"Pray for the Orphan Parts of Me..."

This morning I forgot it was Tuesday. I piddled around the house. Threw my hair into a messy bun.  Five bobby pins and three re-dos later, I was finally content with the amount of “messy” the bun contained. I took my sweet time getting ready and then looked at the clock that read 9:27.

Then I remembered it was a Tuesday.
I had a coffee date with a friend in three minutes.

I frantically threw things in a bag, grabbed a sweater, and headed out my squeaky back door. I ran in, flustered a bit, but she understood. I overcame my bagel craving and covered it up with too much coffee and had some great conversation. We talked of late nights and too much studying, of friends, of canoes and camping, of mice and men (ok, not mice and men). We spoke of the Lord, the hard parts, the comforting parts, the parts we still don’t understand.

The amazing thing is that the conversation I had with her three weeks ago, and the conversation we had today, were so different it makes me want to jump for joy. What the Lord can somehow show someone else, through a hot mess of a sinner like me, is baffling. My words are jumbled and I’m fairly certain only 68% of what I say about the Lord actually makes sense outside of my own head. But he uses the weak. That’s what I am most days. Just weak.

I asked her as we packed up our things and drank the last sips of our coffee, what I could pray for her about and she said to me this,

“you can pray for the orphan parts of me”

a few weeks ago, in our small group, we compared what an orphan acts like in comparison to a daughter of the King. Not so surprisingly, most of us had some orphan tendencies. We work hard to just be better. We punish ourselves. We sit in our guilt. We try to do it on our own. We don’t trust. We judge easily. We think we are just too weak to be used, too selfish, too messy.

The orphan parts of me. What a statement. What a hard thing to acknowledge.
But that is an echo of my hearts cry. Pray for the orphan parts of me. I am a daughter and the Lord loves me and will continually be chasing down my heart in order to show these orphan parts of me, how much of a daughter I really am.