When the older brother lifts his little brother up
So high in the air
above the dock, out into the deep river
Light scatters everywhere
And I think
You are my magical and amazing Older brother
Giving me, your little sister,
Flight
Heroic
Reply
Tag Archives: redemption
The Imaginary Conversation
He is gone now
Gone to me, anyway
But I think of the things I would ask him if he were still here–
Would persistent nausea be enough? Or swarms of stinging insects? How about dead bodies? Or all the stubbed toes and fingers gone unmended
What if this post-modernist hell of your own invention were not unbearable heat, agony and utter despair
Forever/
Just
… an airless room, waiting for a love which never comes
All your regrets all your missed chances
To cry like a baby
Wail for a Savior
Weep at his feet, hair in hand, perfume spent
Shaken finally by what you
Would have been without Him
Frankie Gonzalez
I can feel the force of the grief, another small tragedy. His death, like his life, will be a small story, buried beneath bigger fires, the roiling of big boy fights, what is the death of one little boy when the world is burning?
Everything.
His life was everything
To him
And to the One who stood at the field of Heaven
Waiting all those days to welcome him home
Wipe away every tear
No more crying
No more pain
You say the sweetest things
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
Like a time traveler
Like a time traveler, Lazarus returns, sits with me on the steps of the old San Antonio house
We hug our knees together, the way children do
I tell him my losses
And he tells me his founds
–you never forget the way
Dim shadows turn to light.
Been There All Along
Darling, I have no right to
Look for you
At every bus stop, mailbox, broken sidewalk, out of the corner of my eye as night falls
No right but your love, so true
Been there all along
This Little Girl
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
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.
Always true
Only one of them, the beloved, would be clueless and self-absorbed, inclined to foibles and easily distracted
A regular
Flibbertigibbet!
But the Other One—
He would always be true.
And all the pleasant pictures
I have been having the mildest of stress dreams–quirky, bureaucratic hotel check ins, attempts to gather the hard-to-shepherd, things washed away. I know why the dreams have come, and I doubt they will leave me soon, even if the heat and intensity of a gathering sun should cause them to lose their inevitable grip and dissipate
I turn to morning songs and croak out broken praises
Think I should listen to the Gospel, but chose Isaiah instead
Because these are old
And New Testament times
And we are all in wont
of fierce faces
Isaiah 2:16 KJV
[16] And upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all pleasant pictures.
