Let me paraphrase from my German Grandpa’s prayer book:
“I am a lowly worm, God, stuffed with mud, blindly slithering at your feet.
I am not worthy, and yet, by some miracle,
and through the sanctity of your Son, Lord Jesus Christ,
you do not smear me under your magnificent heel.
Praise to You, and You alone.
In Your infinite grace, I implore You to excuse me for existing. Amen.”
In the middle of the night the TV came blaring on at the foot of my bed. Fuzzy images bashed into ghosts of dreams, ripped me from sleep, thrust me into terror that the Big One Himself had just arrived. It must have been my big toe twitching and reaching that hit the knob that lit the screen that danced with dots of black and white as a sharp “ssss” sliced the night.God and The Boogieman were mostly the same back then. God you could implore, but The Boogieman, little girl, you’d best ignore.
I finally learned to live with night when I moved to the city as a young adult. Streetlight seeped through windows, into my skin and sins and dreams, making me safe at midnight and 3 AM. Back in the country I would run by groves of trees through the dark of night, afraid of evil sprites twisting into trunks, hanging down from boughs, waiting to ensnare me.
I finally understand that God always sees the good in me, even when I can’t locate a bit of it. Even when beauty is engulfed by that damn gigantic self flagellating worm. I lean my chest against the trunk of an old and damaged oak at midnight, at 3 AM, in the middle of the day. Her top is sheered from straight line winds, her knobby, knotty arms reach out, like an old scarecrow of many limbs in a Hitchcock film. She always takes me in.
All that is not true must pass away. God loves that there Boogieman.
The Boogieman just wants to play.