Child of Faith's Father
April 9, 2012
"God sends rams
to all Abrahams,
or at least
to my Isaac and me,"
So I laugh, giddily
at God's feast.
Genesis 22
Romans 4:16
Dreams of Earth and Resurrection
Poems, Songs, and Other Writings
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Following God Together - Apart.
Following God Together - Apart.
February 2012
O Lord, our eyes are fixed on You,
And we’ll
move when You move,
But O Lord,
It’s foggy today;
Where have You painted Your pillar of cloud
On this
canvas of gray?
Or, Lord,
We’re passing through flame,
And as to in which fiery column you glow,
How can we know?
We roam
These paths we thought You
called us to—
Is that a dead end ahead,
Or only a sharp turn?—Or does
the path forge through?
Lord, wouldn’t longer straights
And fewer tracings-back
Constitute a wiser track
Home?
And when?—
When, when, when?—
Will our paths meet again?
And not just meet, but
cleave?
The sun’s hidden up heaven’s sleeve,
And I’ve lost count of turn after turn—
Are You leading us farther or nearer again?
Our hearts burn.
Incarnation
Incarnation
November 2011
You can read
the figures
You can read
the news
People
aren’t numbers
It’s your
attitude (that’s flat)
How can we
know if we don’t go?
How can we
know if we don’t stay?
Incarnation
grips me
and takes me to the city
Incarnation
grips me
and leads me far away
I want to
breathe the air
I want to
eat the fare
I want to
walk the dirt
with feet like yours.
I want to
learn your words
I want to
know your name
What if I
feel the pain
of feet like yours?
But
incarnation grips me
when I see Him:
Swaddled up
in skin,
Rode a
skeleton…
With a heart
of meat,
He was made
of dust –
like the rest of us.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Break Me and Bless Me
Break Me and
Bless Me
Fall 2010
Verse 1
You speak and it’s unclear
My heart is clenched with fear
That what You said is what You really mean.
I cannot answer Yes, Lord,
For my heart, it seeths with greif,
And I cannot make myself believe that You would speak this
pain.
Chorus
Through the long night, don’t let go
Though the day breaks, don’t let go
Fight with me, wrestle with me
Never give in to me: break me and bless me.
Verse 2
Your power is unmatched,
Your strength beyond compare,
And You will bring Your will to come to pass.
Still I fear You’ll let me win, Lord,
But I cannot acquiesce
O bitterest Friend, match blow for blow – don’t abandon me
to my strength:
Chorus
Bridge
God of Jacob, my Portion, my Passion,
Ladder of Jacob, Who opened the heavens,
Spirit Who came down and who remains:
Peniel, Pen’el, uncover Your Face,
Lead me to Bethel from this desolate place;
My soul thirsts for You, the Living God.
Chorus 2
“In the morning, the fleece was wet,
In the morning, the fleece was dry,
And Moses could not run away from the burning bush.
Come and flood My throne with tears,
Come and match your strength to Mine,
For I will not let you break away from Me.”
Chorus
Friday, January 20, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Cambodia Seems Dusty
Cambodia Seems Dusty
To you whom God calls here
Does the day start when the roosters crow?
Seems so:
The day awakes before the
sun.
The sun is strong,
the rain is strong,
and the heat
is strong.
In the villages, the people are friendly—
and weathered.
And everyone comes from the
villages,
Where the rice fields lie flat
lollipopped with
coconut
trees
and palm
trees.
The buildings are bold
bright
blue and red
and
orange and
green and
traffic
median-paint yellow.
The buildings are muted
wood and
faded thatch,
rusty metal
roofs.
The background is bright
rice-green
to shame lawn-care,
tropically flowering-fruiting-and-flourishing
forests and
fields,
farms,
yards, gardens, and
painted pots.
The background is drab
dust-ridden
paved roads,
dust-red
dirt roads,
bare-trampled
yards,
and
construction zones.
The people are rich
See the
thousand rooftops
‘round the
royal palace?
The people are poor
we see the young
ones,
see the old
ones on the street.
The past is bleak—years
of power
struggles,
land-grabbing,
and terror.
The past is glorious—because…
Who has
built such temples?
The future is dark—fears
of
corruption and prostitution
ever
ensnaring,
stripping
the richness of the
land
from all people and
twisting
it into the
pockets
of
a few.
The future is bright—because…
The people
are building,
The church
is dawning,
And after all,
what is the miracle of man but
bones out of
dust,
tendons out of dust,
flesh out of dust,
beating
heart full of dust dissolved in rain,
running
red only by the hands of
God?
And we know:
God’s hands are still moving,
And Cambodia
has a lot of dust.
Christmas 2011
Christmas 2011
I Saw Flies
I saw flies
hoarding on the chapped, sandy bones
and beak, demorphing
into maggots who, crawling tail-first,
reconstruct
the flesh they consumed, and curl into
eggshells, borne away
by flies.
Vultures, too bear gifts
from afar; they cough up chunks of unrotting
meat to reverently
replace –
refitting one piece, then another to untear
into the surgeon’s puzzle of flesh.
Wind sweeps backward
through the desert, moistening
fastening
with unseen fingers: wind-parched, sun-bleached pilgrim feathers
that journeyed long to their source – fastening,
like a dandelion puff in reverse.
The sun saturates
their tones, until the eagle, glowing golden, rises
to its scaling feet, eyes
swelling to refill
sockets, and lunges at the skies.
I saw smoke
falling to where flames lick
ashes and birches charred to dust, leaving
heartwood, sapwood, bark, leaves;
And saw flames floating,
assembling dust into the
alignment of a rosebush,
and burning it alive,
precipitating petals
and thorns out of air.
We
Ran down to the churchyard,
Dug up the graves: father, grandmother, great-great aunt,
Sat down, and
We
Watched
As first to one here, then to another there:
Bones out of dust.
Tendons out of dust.
Flesh out of dust.
Beating heart full of
dust dissolved in rainwater,
now running red.
I never saw
skin spread itself on faces
until the day I saw my great-great grandmother,
beautiful,
lying Eden-naked in her coffin,
breathing.
And yet
I forgot her
when I saw
Him.
February 2011
February 2011
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