Luis, I once lived in a country where the money I earned was worthless outside the country but could buy beautiful, irreplaceable things inside the country. I had a gigantic blue suitcase, a backpack. I took treasure home, but not enough. I should have emptied my bags of all the replaceable things and brought home treasure.
You are home treasure
You are Home, Treasure.
We are eternal, they are eternal, I tell her, but I know that there is something else, the purest kind of paradox, or is it tautology? Etiology? The woman in the park, on the streets, flagging down motorists, in the parking lots of churches, where people congregate like flocks of birds, always, always asking this uncomfortable question–
When was your last normal day? When was your last normal day?
When? When the truth
Stalks in
Wide awake
I can’t have coffee with Tara, the stuff she drinks is way too strong for me now, but I wait for her anyway, keep glancing out smudgy windows at the passing clouds, shafts of light, signifying every
valley filled, hill made low, road made straight, and all these rough, rough ways, smoothed at last.
Luke 3:5
Tara B.
Trust God
Don’t flinch
Luke 19:40 NIV
[40] “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”
I supplicate
Raise hands heavenward-
(Where Thou art)-
Give me stones and pebbles, hands-full-anything-anything
I can lift up to you,
Tell you, breathe on us, breathe us all into
Sharp shafts of light
Dear Scarlett Johansson,
Would you please 1. Read Woody Allen’s Wikipedia page 2. Comment on the number of time he has trucked out the trope of the teenage ingénue in his films and private life 3. Tell us more about how you assess his sexual relationships with these teenage girls (real and thinly fictional) and then
Ask yourself how old was Dylan when she was dragged into a rape story? Would you want that for your daughter? Would anyone?
Believe is a strong word.
With lasting consequences.
Ecclesiastes 4:1-2 KJV
[1] So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. [2] Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.
I generally chafe at the wisdom of Solomon. I want to measure my “wise guys” by their lives–faithfulness, sobriety, compassion. S-man seems to fall abysmally short on all categories.
When I read this verse from Ecclesiastes it resonates with my own sense of the fragility and tenuousness of life, but then I cannot help that Solomon had so many powers the ordinary dude did not have to:
Stop oppression
Comfort the bereaved
And use his power as a monarch to generally improve his culture
He had the power to live a different life, to show a different way. I am no king, but I will be judged by how much better or worse I use my power
To change things.
He says that I have lost my chance with him, as though he is a lottery ticket torn from my grasp by a strong wind in a storm, fluttering away with its winning numbers and it promise of untold riches.
I have lost my chance with him.
A week ago I stood in the Salvation Army and showed my youngest daughter a tee shirt–got love? Become a foster parent.
Her face clouds. Her life was radically altered by my decision to foster parent.
You had your chance with me…
He was small and scratched his face into bloody tiger stripes, he did not speak at almost two years of age. He did not potty train until just before kindergarten. He once desecrated a couch in a strange feral way.
The stories of my chances with him could fill terrible books.
I get it kid, you have a new god now.
But I am haunted by what will happen to you if you don’t have the guts to contemplate
The hell you unleashed on all of us and all it’s damning consequences.
Try to survive today.
I think just to mess with me, the weather app will place one small storm cloud on the far horizon of days. I tell myself, the light is moving away, the days grow short, the heat will break, these are just shoes in a messy front hallway, seemingly lost and matchless, discardable, but
Make no sudden moves
Until the rains come
Carrying Light 