Sunday, December 31, 2017

Incarnation



~*

It's a sort of reincarnation,
 New Years Eve,
The ritual reset,
A time to rebuild

Having shot our wad
 We penniless paupers 
Come to find our empty pockets
Met by Heaven's Hand
Outstretched
 With the offer 
To Begin Again,

Again

Where our Gideon Hearts faltered
Audacious Grace is given
Where we went left instead of Right
The Way Himself makes a way
Where our bargaining for bad fruit
Betrayed our entire garden
Gethsemane's bloody tears are remembered 
Golgotha is once again brought to bear
Sin, thus silenced,
Is made to stand down, 
And we are rendered 
The chance to stand

This remittance
This rebirth
 This "reincarnation"
Is gifted to us

Lavishly,
Lovingly

By Incarnation

Himself

~*

"I AM The Resurrection and The Life!"
-John 11:25

Monday, December 25, 2017

Gift



+

Graced by this gander
Welcome winged harbingers
Warming winter hearts

+

Sunday, December 17, 2017

Reflections



+

For now
That is what we have
We are moons
Reflecting The Light 
of Faraway Day
Into fellow travelers' night...
All of us longing
For Home

+

"Deep darkness will cover the people, but The LORD will rise upon you, His Glory will be seen upon you; The people will come to your light,
and Kings to the brightness of your rising..."

-Isaiah 60:1-3

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Hope



+

With David
I Rise
From the dead child's side
I put aside pleas for what is past,
Fix my eyes forward,
And Wait 
For Solomon
To be born...

+

"For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the shoots of it will not cease nor will they fail."
-Job 14:7

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Believe



+

You can close the blinds
Pull the curtains
Seal off every crack and crevice
Disallowing the Light

You can hunker down in this darkness
Impenetrable
Unperturbed
Insisting "There is no Sun!"
Asserting disbelief in its existence

"How can I," you cry, "believe in a Sun
Which burns
Which causes pain
Which dries up entire deserts
Which hides when warmth is needed most

Whose rising impels me to work
Whose setting allows such Night in my life
When I'm desperate for 
and despairing of the Day?"

You can hold tightly
With the tenacious grip of a toddler
To your defiance of a Deity you don't understand
You can get colder and colder
Wrapped in the blanket of your disbelief
Of your denial
Eschewing any possible Good
Benighted by what you see only as bad

Or

You can risk removal
Of your limited lens
Let your finite perspective
Be peeled away
Accept your smallness in the scheme of Things
Your blindness to The Big Picture

Allow the pain through which you peer
Which has muddied your view
Exposure to Heaven's Orb
Which seems to have wounded you
Which is your only hope for healing

The Sun goes on shining
Whether we believe in it or not
Giving Life
To the most massive of planets
The tiniest of mustard seeds
Indifferent to none
Despite what you thought

His Eye is on the solar system
And the sparrow alike
Nothing goes unnoticed,
Escapes His gaze,
Eludes His Love...

In your most honest moments
The ones no one else sees
When the superfluous is swept away
And all that's left is your most primal knowing
You Do Believe in God

You just don't believe that He is Love
or if you do believe that He is Love
You don't believe He loves You
And the pain of such an errant belief
Is too much to bear
So you choose
Instead
The anesthetic of Unbelief

At war within yourself
This belief and unbelief colliding
In which state Peace is an impossibility

Let It Go

Risk the pain
Feel the fear
But allow also for the possibility of Love
Know simply that you do not know
That even, perhaps, you cannot know

Herein lies the key:
You Do Not Have To Know
Only Believe
What you Deep Down Believe

Let in the Light
And all that comes with it
The "Good"
The "Bad"
The Pain
The Healing

Open the blinds
Choose to see
The Sun is shining
Love Is waiting...

Believe

+

"Come, and let us return to the LORD;
For He has torn, but He will heal us;
He has stricken, but He will bind us up...
His going forth is established as the dawn,
He will come to us like healing rain to the earth."

-Hosea 6:1-3

Monday, November 27, 2017

Treasure



+

The treasure I hold
In this earthen vessel
With riches to vast to be told...

... And "Once upon a time" you had eyes to see,
And "Once upon a time" I had eyes to see...

But there is One
Who calls to me
As though from a far off dream
His eyes scan the horizon 
Of a world I am a stranger in
Searching
For
Me...

The paradox of searching and being searched for
Will one day become finding and being found

... Home Again

Treasured

+

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Esau's Tears



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I feel myself to be
among the Damned 
once blessed
now consigned
to live with my choice
my damned
and damning
free will 

But that which is consigned
can it not be bought again?
Put back into the circulation 
of the Living?

How many times did Hosea's hand 
Redeem 
one so far gone 
not even repentant
strange that she was saved 
(may it be said of me 
and may I not cry 
the unanswered tears of Esau 
as he stared at the bottom of his empty bowl
his Birthright 
but a memory)

+

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Ashes



+

When all you have left
To offer
Is Ashes

Offer them to The One
Who parlays ashes
Into Amazing Grace
Who brings the Phoenix
Out of the fire

Who In The Beginning
Set the precedent,
Breathing Deity into Dust,
Blowing Dead Bones
Into a Divine Battalion

Man's equity
Allows only
For Ashes to Ashes
Dust to Dust

But God Mercifully turns that math on its ear
Exchanging for our prodigal hearts
Every precious thing in His possession,
All of His Household
With All of His Heart

So Go Ahead,
Lay your ashes on the altar
And see Divine Alchemy
alter Everything

+

"I AM the Resurrection and the Life"
- John 11:25

Saturday, September 30, 2017

Bang?



+

The Mystery
Hidden in the hush of Things

Not a Big Bang
But A Still Small Voice
A Let There Be
A Whisper...

If you're quiet
You can hear it

The Secret
of
Everything

+

"In The Beginning
was The Word"
-Genesis 1:1

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Checkmate



+

No choice we make
Can checkmate God
We sometimes check
but never checkmate

We are three year olds playing
With The GrandMaster
Who is Always twenty moves ahead
Who knows The End from The Beginning
Who is the Alpha
And Also
The Omega

The Hands which even death could not hold
Will not be tied by our folly
Our failures do not dictate our future
The Author and Finisher will have
The Final Word,
And in The End
It is not our lapses,
Our laughable loyalty,
Our less than admirable actions,
But Love Himself,
Which will
Checkmate.

+

"'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the LORD, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.'"
-Jeremiah 29:11

Friday, August 25, 2017

Eden's Eclipse




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Astounding how one apple
obscured an entire garden

Like how a little moon,
momentarily,
blocked out an entire sun

Our enemy's tactics remain the same:
He doesn't have to eradicate our Edens,

He simply has to fix our focus 
on one piece of bad fruit.

+

"Let us lay aside every weight, 
and that which so easily and cleverly entangles us...
fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith..."
-Hebrews 12: 1, 2

Friday, August 11, 2017

Dark II


Image result for dark van gogh
"He made darkness His secret hiding place
His canopy around Him was dark waters,
and thick clouds of the skies."
-Psalm 18:11

+

We have a God
Who does not wait
For us to grope our way out of the blackness
Toward some state of elusive "Enlightenment"
Before He deigns
to commune with us...

...No, we have a God
Who, from The Beginning,
Got His Hands dirty,
Forming us from dust...
Who, when we bed down in hell
lays down beside us...
Who, descended to The Pit 
And faced down Death
Unwilling to let go of even the Lowest of the Low...

We have a God
Whose Love goes as deep as our deepest darkness
Who is Light
Yet chooses this darkness as a dwelling place
Because He knew that's where we'd be hiding...

Because He knew
That's precisely
Where we'd need
To Find Him

+

"If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall fall on me'
Even the night shall be light about me;
Indeed, the darkness shall Not hide from You,
But the night shines as the day;
The darkness and the light are both alike to You."
-Psalm 139:11, 12


Tuesday, May 23, 2017

To Matter or Not To Matter.....



+

The Great Gift
Given Every Human Being
is
Choice

Contrary to what the Talking Heads Du Jour
are doling out,
Peddling from their pie holes these days,
Our lives do not Matter
just because we were pooped out onto the planet;

Mankind has been presented
with the Extraordinary Privilege
of Making our Lives Matter...

...Or Not.

To accept the welfare checks of self-esteem
being written out wholesale,
paid to the order of "Whosoever Will"
from a bank account woefully in the red and desperately overdrawn
Is to abdicate our God Given Freedom
of Earning
and Owning
How we Matter to Mankind,
Is to indulge in unpareleled naivete and ineptitude,
being conned with cubic zirconias
out of the Diamond of our Dignity.
To buy in to vacuous verbiage is to Sell-out,
Is to willfully choose Slavery
to the Fickle and Groundless
And Very Changeable
Dictums of the Day.

In the end, it will be a jury of our peers
Which reviews the resume we leave behind,
Wherein our value to humanity is determined:
Whether or not our lives benefited our fellow-man in any way
Whether our lives made other lives better
Whether our lives
Did indeed
Matter...

...or Not.

+

"This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you, that I have placed before you this day, Life or Death, Blessing or Curses;
Now therefore Choose Life, that you and your descendants may live."
-Deuteronomy 30:19

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Emergence



+

Like a Genie in a lamp
An Oak tree in an acorn
A Message in a bottle

I am all of these

Although

To be clear,

He is the Genie
The Oak tree
The Message...

I am only the lamp
the acorn
the bottle,

Rubbed raw
Buried
Broken

So that He may
In the end
Emerge

+

"He died for all, so that all those who live would no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and was raised for their sake."
-2 Corinthians 5:15

Monday, March 27, 2017

Running



+

This Fugitive Futility,
Don't you know?

I AM The Voice from which you run
I AM The Ship on which you steal away
I AM The Fish by which you are swallowed
I AM Shore

Sail your Jonah heart
As far as you can
Into the horizon of your choosing,
You find you run in circles,
Journey ends where it begins
One and the same
God's Global Boundary
Deity's Design
Set in place to safeguard
The Beloved

See in this Planet upon which you've been placed
The metaphor of Me it is meant to be
The Textbook in which you live
This virtual reality
in which you learn
What Is Real

So run if you will
As far as you can
All your running leads back to where it began

Into The Waiting Arms of Omnipresent Omega
Into My Encircling, All Encompassing Embrace
Into the womb of My All-and-In-All Ancient Longing Heart
Which has held you all along

Which you never really left
Anyway

+

"You have hemmed me in, behind and before, and laid Your Hand upon me...Where can I go from Your Spirit?  Or where can I flee from Your Presence?  If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, You are there.  If I take the wings of morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me."
-Psalm 139: 5-10

Monday, March 13, 2017

Ocean





+

You think your mistakes
Greater than My Mercy,
Your lostness
Greater than My Found

Your Grave error
Lies not in missteps and sins
As you suppose,
But in thinking Me bested
by these, your foes

You, Beloved, are the Boat
Carried in the Current of Me...
This River,
Always
and
Ever,
Finds
Home

+

"The Lord your God carried you, and protected you, just as a man carries his son, all along the way which you traveled until you arrived..."
-Deuteronomy 1:31

Hung



+

Even You were suspended
Between Two Places
Feeling the Crucifying Agony
of Duplicity...
...For this too then,
You Died...

Between Heaven and Earth
Wings and Roots
Lift and Landing

Hanging here
In this no-man's-land
Nailed to the cross of my crossroads
My own hand holding the hammer

On the cusp of burial
On the verge of Resurrection,

Hoping in the God
Who Never Forsakes Me

+

"For there is only one God and one Mediator between mankind and God,
The Man Jesus Christ Jesus, Who gave Himself
as a Ransom."
1 Timothy 2:5

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Rest II



+

We want to make sense of the Macro
Yet it's like trying to connect the dots in the stars
We draw a few lines from one point of reference to another
Then draw our conclusions based on those scrawls and scribbles
While there are still galaxies of dots undetected

So if our lens is limited
If we cannot zoom out enough to get the full picture
(Of which we have but a vague awareness, at best)
Maybe the answer is to zoom back in
-At least for a moment-
On the Micro
On the diminutive dots we've collected
And use the Micro to understand the Macro...

...Or at least to have faith in the Macro...

To Sometimes
Just Sometimes
Rest our minds
As best we can,
To become
Once Again
Like little children,
To be at peace with the little we know,
And leave the Stars
to Him.

+

"Come to Me, you who labor and are heavily burdened,
I will give you Rest."
-Matthew 11:28

Thursday, March 2, 2017

Lost?




+

I'm amazed after all these years of walking this path that I still so often am without bearings.
My inability to "Get it right" is laughable, my propensity toward perplexity, unparalleled.

In the movie "Out of Africa", there is a scene depicting Karen Blixen's journey over unfamiliar territory in which she says to her traveling companion, "I think I may have gotten us lost."
By way of reply, he simply answers,
"God is great, M'sabu."
He then puts his head down,
and goes to sleep.

Maybe it's time for me to have a little more faith in God's greatness
And a little less
In my lostness.

+

"God is great, M'sabu."

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Warden



+

Do we cling,
Sometimes,
To prison bars
From Outside the Prison?

Desperate for Freedom
Desperate for The Key

When all that's needed
is for us
to

Let Go

+

"If the Son makes you free,
Then you are Unquestionably
Free."
-John 8:36

Saturday, January 28, 2017

Abundance



+

Nerves rubbed raw
By so much non-reality
Here, I am fed
By Flight
By Stillness
By the Ancient
Eternal
Sameness
of Things...

Nerves rubbed raw
Healed
By Raw, Velveteen Beauty
Which Still
And Always

Abounds

+

-e.a.a. 1/28/17

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Paradox



+

Closing my eyes
I see

The blinds open
And there
The Solid Form
of what previously
was Shadow...

This Path we navigate
by Paradox
The Way
Wending upstream
Against our pragmatic paddles

Better to Let Go
Lie Down
In the Bottom of these Boats

Better to Let
This Strange Current carry us,
Into the Ocean
Of Alpha and Omega

Into the Beginning

And Into

The End...

+

I Corinthians 13:12

Monday, January 23, 2017

Pendulum



+

Swinging
Back and Forth
hanging by Some Invisible Fulcrum
a Hand Which Holds us
Which keeps time

Right...

Left...

And that too seldom breath-of-a-beat
Between the two
When we find ourselves

Dead Center

And our soul thrills...
The micro-moment
Which marks Home
Where, one day,
When all days are done
When the Pendulum is stilled

We will step
From stopped Time
into Eternity

No more Right
No more Left
No more "This way?"
No more "That way?"
But only

THE Way....

Tick

Tock

Tick

Tock........

+

"Lo, I AM with you Always, even to the end of the age."
-Matthew 28:20

Saturday, January 7, 2017

The World in Black and White



+

If we do not find
our Raison d'etre in
Divinity
We will lose it in
Inanity

+

"In Him we live, and move, and have our Being"
-Acts 17:28

Sunday, January 1, 2017

It's Time...


"Restore us, O LORD God Almighty,
Make your face shine upon us
that we may be saved."
-Psalm 80:19

+

May 2017 be

A time to be born
A time to plant
A time to heal
A time to build
A time to laugh
A time to dance
A time to gather
A time to embrace
A time to mend
A time to love

and may it especially be,

A time for
Peace

-Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8

+

Peace be with you all,
Happy New Year
~*~