I want to tell them the truth, to love them, but know my tongue must cut like a surgeon, must possess art this young stutterer lacks. So I pray my Father, “Send me your Spirit, here my will I submit, that Your masterful love I may preach.”
To My Friends:
Your gentle love right now, I see it. You love, but in your love hurt the object. When hardness is wanted you’re found soft, and it kills me not knowing how to tell you—it kills us who know: give an addict money and he’ll overdose, set a madman free and he’ll live on the streets. To love these seems hatred, and yet to not give, to take away their liberty, is true kindness, though unkind.
So to love you must be unloving in this moment, and it will hurt. Ultimate pain and misery is ahead, but to sacrifice now, to have the pain now, may turn the object from destruction. But this covering, this applying of balm to these wounds, is washing over mold. Build not on sand but rock; build not for this temporal peace, but eternal.
I say this seeing the torment comforted, thereby lasting hours when minutes of hitting an un-cushioned wall might have broken the spell. To the point: the lunatic is running things, and here true love is not found in sweet cakes and strawberries, but in thistles and briers. Coldness and not warmth is wanting.
I am outside, knowing not how far you have come, so think me not your judge. I see only this moment—no one is at their best surrounded in shit—but be men now, be hard.
Tale Told 