Category Archives: God

You say the sweetest things

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You say the sweetest things

A soft answer turns away wrath

Love is always patient

What if you took the terrible letters of a curse of sorts

One you never willed and controlled and made it into an acrostic or a cypher-

The letters are a-b-I-r-r-t-u-w

What if that were a word by itself

And you-like the fairy godmother you resemble in rounded form only

No power only soft and aging

No longer the princess or the sleeper or the magic one

Just this one last spell-

Let the word when spoken

Set us free from past and illusion

Let it be the strange, scary truth of the thing-

Oh fragile love-

You say the sweetest things

Pebble Parable

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It was a simple thing

The man reached in and snapped off the treadmill

Came in very close to the boy’s face

Told him “the rules”

Only it turned out “the man” didn’t know the rules as well as he thought he did

Rules like the way a single pebble can make a concentric circle across the whole chest of a river

Or the way the question about what you would do with a time machine

Might just define a person

Forever, forever is how wide and how deep and how long I will

Love you like a pebble

Thrown right at the heart

Of moving water.

The Multiverse You

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It is 4:53 in the morning and the-multiverse-you is sleeping somewhere

(Perhaps held in the arms of her beloved)

…she does not know about the foster children, or the loss, the things you use to distract you

From the sound of being cracked open

a meal, a primitive marine creature–a crab, a lobster, a clam

The oral surgeon calls the missing piece of you by the kind of nickname you might use for a lovable but naughty child—that little stinker or cuss or rascal

Only, the-multiverse-you tells it as though it were a puzzling but mildly discomfiting dream

No mention, no hint even

Of global dishevelment and chaos on the planet where she sleeps,

untouched

As you fiddle with various words for comfort to mask the pain

In all the broken places.

Ah, the tattoo!

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When I was dealing with the trauma of finding out that a little boy I had taken in as a toddler had grown up to become a terrible person I

Had three things

I decided to use as grief-points:

Get a nose ring

Shave my head

Get a tattoo.

This week I have had to face that sometimes “a tattoo” is a luxury item

In a pandemic

In the way grief

Can worm its way into the fabric of who a person is

I am losing something else

Like a tattoo, a marker of the grief

And I found what I would put on that tattoo–

Love is

Unmistakable

Indelible

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There are things that happen in the indelible. First, time becomes a character in the story, exerting control over both the narrative and the heart rate. It moves through each room, touching old pictures and hidden spaces, spinning a cocoon so thick it makes normal movement impossible and must be pulled apart like spun sugar

Next, change

Old you out to sea, pared down, bereft

So you

Write down promises

On every doorpost, every lintel, every exposed beam and limb

Let the words become living things

A forest in the house

She calls him

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Revelation 19:16 NIV

[16] On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written:

king of kings and lord of lords.

She calls him King of Heaven. I like that

Evoke the way you effortlessly possess

The sky, the clouds, rolled up One Day for something new. I want to gather these flocks of clouds, the silvery colors of this matchless afternoon

Wonder what is written on you

Wonder what you will write forever

On me

Mark me

Mark me out as your own

This Little Girl

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I want to say so many things to

This man who does not really see

“This little girl”

But I know You

See her, see me, see them

All the little ones who

Need a God like You

Take my sins away, heal my wounds, stay until I am well, bring justice in your wings, never blame the victim, never stop searching for treasure

You

who were, who are, who always will be

Just You,

and “this little girl”

Eschaton and testing for Covid-19

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About a month ago I spent a day dragging my family through a crash course in coronavirus. It was appalling.

  • The range of symptoms is highly variable.
  • Carriers can be asymptomatic.
  • With over 200 mutating strains, the range of severity in this disease can be highly variable.
  • A person can be exposed to the mild strains, and still get hit by a secondary, more severe infection.

We put too much emphasis on testing. Testing would be great only if there were limitless tests and the tests were far more reliable than they are. If that were the case then we should all follow a protocol of weekly prophylactic testing.

Not feasible right now.

A few years ago my family started to play a modified version of a very complicated fictional tennis game from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. His version was very apocalyptic (fitting); ours was as well but with a fraction of the complexity.

In our version two teams of as many people as you have (evenly divided, of course) face each other on either side of the net. We divided as many balls as we could muster and started hitting them across the net relentlessly. The opposing team did the same. At a predetermined point (like music chairs), we would pause the game. The team with fewer balls on their side won that round and then we would continue.

Great cardio workout. Quickly exhausting.

That is coronavirus. We will all face an onslaught of a relentlessly moving, mutating virus which can spread quickly, if not effortlessly, through contact and fomite transmission.

Eschaton is a fun game.

This is not. But if I know one thing about how to “win” at eschaton, it is organize your team and don’t stop lobbing the balls back across the net.

We don’t play eschaton right now. Our tennis court is closed. That is a good thing. The best way to “win” at this is to assume we are all spreaders and keep us all

Six feet apart.

Pray. Pray because our lives depend on it. Imagine what a simple game of eschaton would look like if

God were clearly on

The winning side.

Matthew 17:20-21 KJV

[20] And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. [21] Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.