I could be a quark or an hurtling star,
A duck or a chicken
Living on one side of a beat-up plank fence
With knots in it, and scooped out holes
Signifying they all used to be trees
and the fence and the yard and the girl are just
Another kind of spaceship
Prone to sunset
Nothing can stop the Splendor from breaking through
Every hole in the fence.
John 4:12 KJV
[12] Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle?
I have sat in the noonday sun with these two people for hours here and there over the course of my own friendship with the Man in the story.
He could have just answered her–
Yes!
You betcha!
Absolutely!
But he knows I will be listening, that others will be listening so..
John 4:13-14 KJV
[13] Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: [14] But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.
A person cannot go wrong with living water.
But it is worth noticing the question she asks–
Is Jesus more powerful than Jacob?
Strange to think of all the days when
The hope of Mankind hinge on the Jacobs of history.
When Jesus was coming
The Breaker
The strong right arm of God
The one who makes all other heroes look
Like chumps and losers
Jesus–
Living Water
I have never been a roller coaster girl. Too queasy, but these days the ride is all mental grit and actuarial tables–I stop in the credit union parking lot just as the preacher on the radio quotes Jesus–ask anything in my name and I will give it to you!
Ok, God, I tell Him, make those doctors brave
Could substitute kind, generous, humble, compassionate
Feels impossible, I tell Him then
He reminds me
Impossible
Is His specialty.
John 5:3-4 KJV
[3] In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. [4] For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.
My first question for you is–do you believe there was an angel who came down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the waters?
So one person each time could be healed?
Crazy, right?
But no crazier than believing that Jesus healed the man who had been at the pool so long, who does not turn out to be the most grateful healed man.
I have skirted the issue of the angel at the pool for years, choosing instead to focus on Jesus and the man and the religious oligarchs who made it hard for Jesus.
I understand that angel complicates everything–messenger of God who brings some healing, brings some hope only
In a certain season.
People look for hope in all kinds of things–money, elaborate shelter, the absence of risk, the presence of satiety.
Other people
It is not hard to believe in God
By the power of blinking stars and damselflies, it is hard not to believe in God
But what is hard
Is choosing to only
Believe in God
For the hope where there is none
For the rain in a dry land
For miracle in the Iron Age of science
Hard to believe that God could comfort every soul in Lebanon when Lebanon is not sufficient to burn
Hard to believe in Resurrection at the foot of the Cross
But if you can or do
Cling to Resurrection
All things are possible
Miraculous little
damselfly.
Come, girl, let us pause and make sandcastles in the dust where once there were courts of stone, because kings may come to tear down both walls and doors, regard or disregard our little lives, take stones one from another and make each a witness
what door will you keep then, when the one true King has passed us by and taking in his wake all love, leaving us without our voices to praise him or call out? Let stones cry out if we do not
Let the doors we have kept keep us instead
John 18 KJV
Exodus 19:5 KJV
[5] Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine:
Deuteronomy 7:6 KJV
[6] For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.
Deuteronomy 14:2 KJV
[2] For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.
These three calling out verses are similar in many ways. God calls us. We are supposed to listen to His voice. If we do listen we are considered by Him (and often others) as special or peculiar.
Special sounds good, but peculiar can raise some eyebrows. Peculiar is different, not like the others, marked out.
We might not want all that, but it is what it means to be God’s treasure.
He tells us we are his valuable prizes, and we, as the valued prizes, do what he tells us to do,
No matter what
Genesis 43:23 KJV
[23] And he said, Peace be to you, fear not: your God, and the God of your father, hath given you treasure in your sacks: I had your money. And he brought Simeon out unto them.
Joseph was sold as a slave by his brothers. He was not their treasure. He was, at some point, so despised by them that they would have killed him. They went to great pains to get rid of him, and then let’s face it–life as a slave was no picnic for Joseph. He had so many days of servitude, imprisonment, and darkness. All because his brothers did not see he was treasure.
The similarity between Joseph and Jesus is strong and intentional. Many of us are like Joseph’s brothers, just trying to get Jesus out of the picture so we don’t have to deal with him, all while he has willingly taken on our enslavement, our imprisonments, our being left for dead.
And yet Joseph restores. He gives both life and treasure to his brothers when they had deprived him of his own
In the same way Jesus does, turning rejection into blessing the moment we realize
We can’t live without him.
When I wrote the slim, hasty, typo-ridden memoir Just, I used pseudonyms.
I chose to link my adopted children’s pseudonyms to their first initials C became Sea,
Sea like the color of his eyes
Sea like the cold ocean we stood in together
Sea like the depths, the hidden things both beautiful and terrible, the bigness of it all
Sea, placeholder for the God who makes seas then makes them evanesce
C is lost to me for now. He has disowned both me and the God who made me
But I can still remember
The time you hit your mouth on the hard metal of the seesaw and we had to rush you to the dentist
The way we would wait until you were sleeping to exclaim over your cuteness because
Most times when you were awake there was both sturm und drang
The time we went to the shore and I carried you on my back and you pummeled my head all the way back to the car
If I had a dollar for every time you hurt me or someone else I love dearly
It would not begin to be as much as you are worth
Of your eternal value
Of the Light you can become forever
If you just
Turn and face the Sea.
I once did a series of poems called the calvarium poems. I called them that. They remain in a kind of womblike obscurity, you could say the poems were like children
If only an ordinary person like me could
Cast a spell with words
Hocus pocus–live!
Abracadabra–live!
I alternate between believing
That the dry bones are the children tossed away from their mothers, their doctors, their strangers holding signs and vigil across the street from the alien clinics, iron bars on windows, misleading titles, security guards and not enough imminently visible heartbreak over this or
The people, the-all-of-us, too craven to save their little, perfect, amazing
Calvariums.
Carrying Light 