Category Archives: grief

Deserve versus worth

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We can say we do not deserve what we get–either lottery or traffic ticket.  We can even get quite indignant about it.

And yet if we are to believe the Cross, we always deserve worse than we get. Death, plague, betrayal, are all the carrion birds circling the dilemma of our sin.

We do not want to face what we have earned in our rebellion against love.

Which brings us to our worth.  

We are by native value just pennies on the ground.  But we have been purchased at such an extravagant cost by the One who loves us.

This extravagant sacrifice is the center longing of every human love story–to be redeemed, raised, and transformed by a love that will not relent or tarnish.

That is Passion.  Death by crucifixion passion.  Resurrect us in His arms passion.

I-will-never-leave-you-or-forsake-you-love.

Look for you in every crowd

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Words betray only the barest threads of love

“A mother for a child”

You must know I always

Wanted to keep the possessive

Pronoun “mine”

In our relationship

They took that from us

Let me see how

These tiny seeds of faith

Could move mountains 

Losing sight of light to find it

Time makes

Trees from seeds/

Holes in the arms of love

I look for your face in every crowd

And the pictures you post to the world

Of a baby I once held 

So dear, beautiful girl

So always, always dear

A million times

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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

The Other Guys

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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.

strong drink

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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

Ordinary Sadness

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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 

Swaddling Clothes

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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.

We are fire

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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

Unfaithful

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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.