I tell
The young man that I have
Fallen a million times
(Felt like it anyway)
A million falls
A million failures
A million times
An arbitrary number
Not as funny as bazillions or gazillions
Arms spread wide to denote the bigness of the thing
God sent His one and only Son
…to fall like this?
Fail like this?
Criminal nailed to a tree?
His falling and my falling, so different
His fall just
To rise to life,
Me in His arms
What if
Words in a bottle were
Worlds in a bottle
What if
You and I
Were strangers in a room
Filled with people
Just as broken as me
What if
There really was
A connection between
Calvary and cavalry
And one could be used
To summon the other
What if you had a child
You loved very much
Who would be raised by
One kind of
Monster or another?
What would you do
To save her?
What would you
Do to bring her Home
?
i love the story of Peter falling into the water.
Oh, wait, that is right–the story of Peter walking on water?
Of all the accounts of Jesus’ miracles, this one most resembles a Mark Wahlberg action movie.
And then Jesus walks out in the middle of a night storm on the sea and they think he is a ghost?
Are you kidding me?!
And then Peter decides that the best way to test the identity of the physics-defying apparition is to get out of the boat and walk to him?
It all feels pretty sci-fi. Until Peter looks down and sees “reality,” panics, and plunges into the pitch-dark stormy water.
There were moments in this story that were both freakishly exhilarating and unnecessarily terrifying.
Jesus does not engineer this event in the lives of Peter and the others simply to give everyone a good fish tale.
He does what he does because he can.
He does what he does because they need to see him the way he really is.
He does what he does because life is scary and dangerous and we all need to know that there is just this one Person who can fish us out of the storm and break the rules of physics to save us.
Think about the time Peter spent in the drink–cold, surrounded by heavy waves, dark, gasping for both life and breath.
Where were the other guys?
Shocked and useless in the boat.
People are wonderful, sometimes gracious creatures, but when it comes to drowning in the darkest storms of life, it is best to keep your eyes pinned on Jesus.
He can do the impossible. And the impossible is what we all need–hope in the storm, life after death…
Walking on water.
when the King arises
He runs to us
These words, weapons, shields
Tokens of splendor
Silver refined in the crucible
(For what is crucible but a fancy word for Cross?)
Gold fired seven
Times this burning
Brighter than the sun
Distill this ghost of a man
Standing close to a lone Word
Strong enough
To call him from the grave
Back to life
I have a tennis ball, Gatorade bottle top, and an ailing succulent in front of my house.
For three very different reasons I will need to move them soon. I haven’t yet because I am lazy.
Lazy, and prone to markers in the wind.
Leaves fall and God says I love you.
Rubber bands, hair bands, flossers, and pennies are flotsam God sends to us in the unlikeliest of places–I love you.
Considering that we are puny and mean and He is the God of the infinite universe, His extravagant love notes are bewildering and lovely.
People can be love notes as well. The baby singing in the car, children building sand castles, anyone doing anything brave and true–I love you.
Do you know He loves you? Do you look for signs of Him in the world?
To paraphrase the famous conversation from The Count of Monte Cristo–even if you don’t believe in Him, He believes in you.
I am grateful for the rain
On this dry patch of earth
I know the difference between
Accidents and miracles
And wish to thank
The God of ordinary sadness
Who sits next to me
on the sinking-in-the-middle
Patched-with-a-heart
-on-the-back
$35 couch
Willing to abide in the center
Of my vertiginous grief
He says
Take courage
It is I
Do not be afraid
I have a friend who fights. She has brightly colored hand wraps that she uses to protect her hands beneath her boxing gloves.
She bandages each hand so that the knuckle is protected, the wrist and all the space in between.
When I have watched her wrap and unwrap her hands it has reminded me of Jesus.
I think of him as a baby. In the primitive conditions of his arrival, the Bible records his swaddling–wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger.
Descriptions of ancient infant swaddling talk about cleaning the newborn with oil and salt, then wrapping the child in strips of torn cloth.
Lazarus was swaddled when he emerged from his tomb.
The ancients swaddled their newborns and their dead, wrapping both in the same strips of cloth, washing each for the journey ahead.
The story of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany bears striking resemblance to his washing as a newborn and is a stated preparation for the soon-to-be swaddling of his dead body.
Three days is a long time to wait for a resurrection, four days is even longer. But for many of us 20, 30, or 40 years is how long we have waited for our dead to rise to life.
And if eternity is the span of human existence, then it is also the length of time we must measure each human soul, inside or outside our dark and solitary tombs.
To believe in the resurrection of the dead is to believe in the extreme triumph of Life over death, heaven over hell, good over bad.
To stand at the mouth of the tomb and know that someday each of us will be called to walk out of our tombs into Light.
I see him addressing
An undiluted crowd–
You are the light of the world
We are?
Sheep, maybe
Or chicken (I know my coward heart)
But surely not light
Too strong, too bright, too burning
We must burn on
This Mount of Olives
This Garden of Gethesmane
This history and geography of light poured out in the crushing weight
Upon olives rendering
Oil and salt rubbed on the skin of the newborn child
Anointing a king
The King
Of light
Who holds
Each burning
Coil of a star,
The core of fire within each churning planet
Our ordinary souls
In the palms of his stretched-wide
Hands
Dante, in his fictional portrayal of hell, put traitors at its dark, tortured core.
To betray love and abandon those close to you was a big deal for Dante.
As a writer, that is…as a man he was no hero.
Few of us are. We are all unfaithful to someone or something–our high school crush, our diet…something.
To be human is to cheat a little, I guess. But we must acknowledge this–we, each of us alone are responsible for the lines we draw around what we hold dear.
Draw the lines wrong and the “dear” slips away.
We tell ourselves–I will not go past this point of demarcation–a line drawn just past a “something” we should already not covet or consume.
We say to ourselves either–
I will not do this
Or…
I deserve…
It is the “I deserve” part we should pause to examine. Sinners (a quaint old word for all of us) tend to justify their infidelities with deserve and must have. Then cloak the indulgence in the illusion of secrecy–no one will know.
But Someone always knows.
He knows because He is God, and by definition omniscient.
He knows all our secret stories of unfaithfulness, squalor, and sin because they were poured out on Him
In the rictus of the Cross
In the jeers of the crowd
In the agony of physical abuse
In the final unbearable…
In the final unbearable He bore to make us
Faithful.
I was struck by a stranger’s assertion–a totally innocent person.
There are no totally innocent people. No one is that good. We ride our bicycles in the darkness without a light, go places and do things we simply should not. Not go. Not be. Not do.
It seems to me that putting two teenagers on display for a gruesome, heartless murder is a little like putting them into an ancient coliseum, only our lions are as digital as our judgement.
We say none of the things we should say. We are afraid of the truth. Simple, awful truth.
Truth: a young girl’s sexual partner can harm her. Irrevocably harm her.
Truth: there are great, tragic gaps in the story of Hae Min’s murder that should have been filled by adults–mentoring, listening, intervening, protecting.
People can be dangerous, prone to violence and heartbreak.
And….
All our empty words cannot bring back the dead.
It is difficult for me to believe that Jay fabricated his story whole cloth. It makes more sense that he found himself trapped inside a story of violence and death and told parts of a terrible truth.
But “part of the truth” is not enough for any of us to survive. What we all need is naked truth, but naked truth is excoriating–tearing families, communities, faith, and assumptions.
Naked truth requires a Savior–
Our single and only Totally Innocent Man.
He died surrounded by the guilty
He died to pay for the last choking lonely terrible life of a girl who fell into the hands of violence.
He died for us, the broken.
Not just for the terrible secrets of two boys involved in a crime. But all of us as well.
All cries for justice and truth lead inexorably to the Cross…
Carrying Light 