What God gives
Is the perfect giving
And what God withholds
Is the perfect withholding.
Consider the bold perfection
That is our lives.
God is dialoguing
And his language
Is our circumstances.
The secret of contentment is to know:
Whatever happens is under God’s control.
Even the pain. The unspeakable,
The incomprehensible. The litany
Of tragedy we cannot even bring
Ourselves to speak of.
I am learning,
To go limp in His hand.
To lay down
My cheek against the ground
To see the mountains in the distance
Cupped like fingers
And to witness
God: Skin to skin.
The rough callus, the fissures
Of experience, the confidence
Of His grip as I lay across His palm
Like the dead lay in their graves
Unconcerned about their days.
When I am calm,
And sane, I love
The hand that
Holds me, the One who
Utterly knows me.
My life is the answer
To my prayers, if I could
Pray His will. Every crack
In my windshield, every
Hole in my jeans is nothing less
Than Providence.
God inside the Commonplace.
We are learning to love
His Answer. In all things.
Even His silence. To adore
Even His violence.
To passionately love
Someone we do not understand.
To love a Father’s hands.
I am learning not only
To accept the things I cannot change;
But to love them.
They are boulders
Lovingly situated,
Not to be hit, or hated.
For they can only be moved
By the One who purposely
Put them there.
Stone billboards rooted in my life
Reminding me “I AM NOT GOD”
in bolded letters, underline, italics.
Double underline.
Triple exclamation point.
So we wait, like a lovesick bride
Who waits for her warrior to come home
To light the fire and split the stone.
I have tried so hard
To pray my way out
Of my weakness.
Because sometimes I don’t understand this:
The ubiquity of my failure
Makes me fertile ground for a Savior.
A candidate for resurrection.
The God who handcrafted every snowflake
Is also handcrafting my story
For my joy and for His glory
And to shake my fist at the artist
Is to show my rash forgetfulness
To thrash against my helplessness
And deny that there’s a sense this makes.
It’s either God
Or Entropy. There is no
Middle ground. Our hearts
Must choose a side.
A double-minded man
Is unstable in all his ways.
And still God paints.
So patient with His strokes.
Even as I shake my fist,
He paints.
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