Change

OK OK last bit of poetry stuff, then I'll write something that actually matters. This is another spoken word piece that I did because the mood struck me.

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Late the other night I was driving down the street, black as only darkness can be, waiting while both my car and my mind idled. The candy apple red held me to a stop and when the Christmas colors exchanged places, I saw that the light did something that I’d been aching to do for far too long, change. See I’ve been rolling down the hill of my life like a cliché snowball But I just gather clutter and insecurities to me. Like gum on the bottom of my show it clings, and although I’m moving forward, I’m going nowhere. I’d like to blame external forces, like everyone and everything else but me, because then I don’t have to look into the mirror and face the person I haven’t become.

The dust on my Bible’s gotten so thick that when blown off the motes dance like pixie dust in the failing light.

Change hasn’t come hunting me down like I’d long believed it would. No dire quest has presented itself and honestly I’m not sure I’d fit into those superhero tights anyway. It’s terrifying to know that you are your own arch-nemesis and that you’ll fight the good fight right after American Idol. Turns of the catalyst to a radical new life was written thousands of years ago and all I’m asked to give is everything. Not that bad in retrospect, I could’ve been asked for more. I’m told by authors of old that my soul has been sold by faith not by gold. I’m politely informed that I’m part of the body of Christ, but that’s OK, I’m pretty sure I’m a spleen. God wants to use me and all that he asks is everything, thank Him it isn’t more. Guess I’ve been conditioned to be commissioned, but I’ve been in remission because of an omission but Christ has been fishin so I guess I’ll bite. The road is narrow but at least it’s well lit, and I swear I can see myself in tights on the other side. What do I have to lose?

1) My foolish pride. It clings to me, invisible to my eyes but it’s like a neon sign to all of my friends. I’ve grown so used to the weight that the light doesn’t keep me up at night, and I’m afraid that without my bravado I’ll become too mundane to be self-important. My pride has been a constant companion whispering sweet lies in my ear telling me that it’s not good enough to be good enough, it’s better to be better than everyone else. So I tear others down and plant my flag in their rubble. When asked to give up my pride the silence was so profound, I almost didn’t hear the quiet voice of the creator whispering, “You are mine, and I love you.”

2) My delusions of grandeur. I’ve dreamt like every young boy who’s never grown to be a man of my name being known far and wide and commonly used as a synonym for awesomeness. Sick, sycophantic, sideways, screwed up, stupid, silly, notions of needing to hide my face long enough to relent to the adoring masses that flocked to be near me. I’ve always thought that the pinnacle of achievement would be to have my image be synonymous with fame, but Christ said that I should be synonymous with His holy name. To be known not by who you claim to be, but by whom you represent. Not by deeds of self glorification, but by a presence of purification, that would be quite a sensation, worthy of presentation.

3) My time. My internal clock was constantly reading “Who Cares?” and the alarm never went off. I was living under the notion that a simple profession was all I needed to give and from then my life would in of itself be lived for a higher cause. Much to my dismay, like dragons, this just wasn't true either. It turns out to say and to do are not distant cousins and invoking one didn’t invite to other. I was hoping by telling others that Christ loved that that would be enough, I never expected I’d have to show them it was true. So my time shifted from Call of Duty to the duty of the call, from pretending to preaching, from sleep to study, from texting to the text. When the seconds of the minutes of the hours of the days starting adding up I started seeing Christ in the margins and soon as the sum. It made the difference of chocolate and vanilla and I hate vanilla.

4) My heart, soul, mind and a couple of bucks in change. Once the currency of my self-importance became depleted, it turns out I was broke. Broken. This is exactly where I needed to start with God, broken and looking for him to fix me. Like a master craftsman he reforged me using all the best parts and making me anew. Once again I didn’t recognize my reflection because it was no longer my image that I saw but myself made in His. I was a spleen no more.

I am His hands doing good works and holding the hands of those who have lost hope. I am the feet, walking with others towards Christ and guiding those back who have lost their way. I am the mouth speaking the words that Christ has put there, spilling out verbs like faith, love, and hope that I’d always believed were nouns. I am the ears hearing the stories of the forgotten, listening for the cues to tell that there’s more to this life and like Dorothy they’ll find it in stunning Technicolor. I am the eyes, seeing people as Christ sees them, perfect because he made them. And I am the back that bears the cross daily, dies to myself and lives the way he designed me to.

I found that the more I gave the less I wanted to hang onto and the more he used me the more I wanted to be used. I’d been re-positioned to become fully commissioned. Low and behold all that he asked from me was everything and it turns out that really wasn’t much to give at all.

San Francisco

The following is a peace I did that's meant to be read as a spoken word bit. It follows the idea of the being surrounded by humanity but feeling like it's broken and somehow distorted. I wrote the line "I feel like everyone here wants to rob me but they’d settle for telling me their life story" while walking through the city because it stood out as the truest possible thing about those walking all around me. There's something incredibly heartbreaking about standing around so many people who can be found everywhere get they're totally lost.

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San Francisco. The sun is high casting long shadows like dark funhouse mirror versions of my person on the littered pavement. The city here tingles with delicate beauty and an electric danger.

I feel like everyone here wants to rob me but they’d settle for telling me their life story.

Crazy homeless people seem to infest this city like fleas on a dog. Everyone is screaming opinions and nonsensical words to passersby. Stories in pretend languages are cried out like the world has ended and they’re the only ones who know. Joints are freely shared because incarceration means for one night a bed and a meal. Glances tell me that everyone here wants to avoid the harsh reality that they are all alone and surrounded simultaneously.

I watch as a frail Asian man drops breadcrumbs to the pigeons and seagulls and judging by the amount of bread that he’s brought I’m guessing this is a daily routine. His glasses balloon his eyes to comic proportions and I see written there like it’s been chiseled in stone that the world has not been kind to him and more than anything I want to give him a hug and tell him that although the bad outweighs the good in this world that joy exists like hidden glints of light off of murky puddles on the ground. He drops the breadcrumbs on the ground as close to his person as the birds will come. With a flick of his wrist he could end their lives but I’m guessing that it’s the closest contact he ever has with another living being. I watch men clutching trash bags that contain anything but.

People staring into empty space but I know that something dances before their eyes just out the field of our vision, on imaginary roads they traverse every day. The lilting jilting walk of unsteady legs transporting unsteady minds are prevalent throughout this city. Their brains are like puzzles, all the pieces accounted for but picture just isn’t complete.

I feel like everyone here wants to rob me but they’d settle for telling me their life story.

I watch as people talk to their dogs and the canines return the unintelligible syllables with looks of patience and understanding. People are shouting at strangers just to get reactions that prove their existence. Some men are walking with purpose, and others just walking to keep the earth spinning. I see a thousand faces I’ve seen before, and all of them are unfamiliar. I watch a man walking down the street dribbling a basketball that isn’t there. Based on his ill-fitting clothing and his lack of personal hygiene, I’m guessing that eye contact is a precious commodity that he isn’t often afforded.

Men and women are desperate to tell me how the world works and the longer I listen the more reason I see in their madness. I eavesdrop on a one sided conversation a woman has with a brother that died a long time ago. She points a dirty finger and accuses him of molesting her and ruining her life, then with real tears for a fake brother she forgives him and I can only wonder if she got the privilege to tell him all those things while he still traversed this world.

If home is where the heart is then I suspect that these people here are having an out of body experience.

I see a man tell a dirty joke in a forgiven language to no one and everyone.

Do these people know that they matter? Do they know that they exist? If one of them dies will there be anyone to carry on the memory of the fallen? God, do they know that they’re loved? It’s gut-wrenching to see people with stories of anguish and lies, stories that will never be told wandering the streets like tumbleweeds in a high wind. I would ask but I’m not sure I’m fluent enough in the tongue of insanity to make sense of the gibberish responses.

 If we are dwelling in a sea of humanity then these people are goldfishes.

A dime a dozen and passed over by society.

How does God judge those that don’t exist in this physical world, but rather exist in a mental state of confusion? Gently I hope. They’ll die with no headstone and no mourners. Can we restore these people simply by making them feel loved?

I read a book once where a man wrote that we are defined by those that love us. If that’s true then that wide chasm we believe separates us from the bums is but a small step filled with heartbreak. It’s promises made but never kept. It’s hurt that’s never had a chance to heal. It’s disappointment without relief that has turned these people’s minds into the soup they stand in line for.

I feel like everyone here wants to rob me but they’d settle for telling me their life story.

They come to me with outstretched hands accidentally asking for the one thing they need most, change. The sad thing is that I possess the key to the change they so desperately need and I carry it with me almost daily but the only time I really use it is for trivia, or to prove a point in an argument, or when I want to appear righteous. It’s a book that is full of divine truth that is all too often overlooked and always taken for granted by those with easy access to it. The people here need to be told that they are loved by the author of that book because until they understood that they are precious and have worth they’re just lost sheep caught out in the harsh weather of indifference.

My porcelain heart breaks again for these people who live under the lie that they are not important.

 If the road to hell is paved with good intentions then the road to heaven must be paved with acts of faith.

We can choose to ignore what’s going on but a spade is a spade and ignorance is just ignorance. Anyone who calls it bliss is too foolish to appreciate bliss.

I see a man pull a lamp from a trash pile and like the lamp can no longer, his face lights up. Deep wrinkle lines in his face battered by too much substance abuse showed me a map of happiness not often expressed. “I’ve found stuff like and sold it at pawn shops for $600”, he tells me because my look of amusement at his antics shows that I’m aware his heart still beats. I smile and don’t say that I’m sure he’ll spend the money on this that will quicken death’s inevitable march. He keeps smiling and showing the other vagrants and I’m almost jealous that one man could divine such pleasure from a forgotten lamp.

I feel like everyone here wants to rob me but they’d settle for telling me their life story.

Story of Love

This is a little poem that I wrote a long time ago and just thought I'd dredge up. I wrote it for a lesson plan and I'll admit it's actually not too bad, but then again I don't know if it's any good either.

Story of Love

In the beginning there was God, and God was love

He was perfect in his love and because of it God created man

With the first breath of life that was forced into the dust figure of Adam God intended love to be the very power behind the start of life

When Adam awoke he found a world created for him because a powerful Maker wanted to give Adam the very finest he had to offer

The day time was filled with a paradise of creatures on earth and at night the skies displayed the vast theater of God

Adam and God dwelled together in love

Because God wanted Adam's knowledge of love to deepen he soon gave Adam a companion to walk with him through the many trials of life

For God knew that although he had created something perfect in love that man would turn his back on God and choose what he foolishly thought to be wisdom

Perfect in its conception by the creator and forever marred by the creation, man fell and with it love too was forever altered

But hope still lingered

Eventually love blossomed and Adam and Eve conceived sons

Tragically the earth was once again struck by dark powers when love took on a deplorable new form, love of the self

Cain murdered Able

Like dark stands opposite to light so hate was born to diminish love

God's people went about the earth disrupting God's intentions until redemption for mankind became an impossible concept

Even though the evil of men had spread beyond reproof God loved his creation still and so he gave it a chance to start over in the form of a forty day torrent of water from the heavens

Yet mankind still sought to split themselves into factions, warring in a never-ending conquest for superiority, abandoning the concept of love

Through the ages God's faith in us endured

He still loved his people enough to give them heroes with names that echo in eternity, names like Moses, Joseph, Jacob, Elijah, Ruth, Ester, David, Job, and Daniel

While man continued to flourish and flounder, God devised a way to once and for all communicate his extreme love for a people he so desperately wanted to connect to

Christ was born of a woman, and God incarnate walked the earth

Christ loved everyone regardless of race, creed, station in life, or deeds committed in the past

Christ shattered our concept of love when he not only told us to love our enemies but then died to prove that he meant it

God stood by and sacrificed his own son that through the perfection of his life and ultimately the selflessness of his death, all men might have a standard to which they could hold love

When Christ rose after descending for three days into hell he returned triumphant as a living testament that love conquers all, even a torturous death, even for an unrepentant species

Our knowledge of love could have stopped there but God wanted our understanding to be complete and deep and so he gave us twenty-three other books of the Bible after the stories of the life and times of Christ, so that we could fully appreciate what our Heavenly Father has done for us in giving us love

Throughout his books love was an overarching theme and at the end came a warning of what was to come when God's love would leave this world

We now stand as a culture that doesn't understand what the true significance of the word love

We have perverted, twisted, misused, misunderstood, and abused this gift of love

We have taken it from its exalted position and made it a cliché to be falsely understood in a single song on the radio

Rejecting the shape of love we have instead formed a mold into which we continually cram our limited understanding of love

Stripped of its power, brought low by villains, and overused to the extremity, love now seems a trite phrase that we can barely tell one another with conviction

The idea that an all powerful God could hunger for a connection with us so much that he sent the most precious gift that he could fashion and then let dirty hands put nails into his sons' is so unbelievable that the world at large chooses to reject it

Rather we'd set our sight on things that glitter in the sun or melt in our hands

We'll stamp the word on t-shirts, tattoo it on our bodies, demand it from our fellow man, but all the mean while, fail to truly witness it a world created solely for us

God's love is so limitless, so profound, so deep and wide, so singular, so important, that to really think about it would bring the proudest man to his knees in utter awe of the thought that it's also so personal

You can't experience joy without it, it's the sweet flavoring of life that makes tragedy bearable

Love is a connection so unfathomably incomprehensible that we strive to make mentioning it a routine in order to survive the day

Unlike any other force in the universe it can tear a soul asunder, rip the heart right from our chest, and at the same time it's the only thing that can ever make us truly whole

No other gift could be so precious, no other feeling could be so breathtakingly stunning, no other desire so provocative as love

No matter what we tell ourselves, no matter what we've done, no matter where we've been, or no matter how far we've gone, Christ promises us that he will always unconditionally, unflinchingly, unchangingly, undeservingly, eternally love us for who we are

As the story of love is being continually written it makes each of us stop and ponder our role

Will we become beacons of God's love or a bitter example of a loveless life wasted?

Can we attempt to live up to the lofty ideals that Christ gave us for love or will we rather fall short of the intensity that love has the potential to hold?

It comes down to just this and nothing more, can we, knowing what God has done for us in writing the story of love, afford to take our names out of that book of life, by denying the existence of our creator and can we accept that we are worthy to be loved just as our neighbor is worthy of being loved?

In the end there is God, and God is love

Ephesians 3:16-19 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Creation

I was talking to my dad the other day as we sat at Flame Broiler eating a healthy lunch. Being the concerned father that he is he asked how my studies were going and what I was doing in class at the moment. I told him that I'm bogged down in studying 3 different views of the timeline of creation and that to be honest I was getting a little fed up with it. I asked him if he had an opinion on the whole subject and, being that he is a Peterson of course he had an opinion. He said that he had all ways ascribed to the K.I.S.S. method of reading the Bible. He smiled and told me that stood for Keep It Simple Stupid. He said that as he’d read the Bible throughout his life he’s found this principal to be a good one and that all too often we tend to muddle things in the Bible and to confuse what it’s trying to tell us in the process of appearing to be smart. He said that although there are different views really what matters is that God did the creating and the rest will be argued until the end of time. Ultimately as we conversed and in light of my own meditations I’m inclined to agree. I remember reading the story of the creation of the world and falling into the wonder of it as I was amazed that God was so powerful he created everything around us. I remember trying to imagine what it must have looked like if I was standing at the creator’s side and marveling over each new wonder as he unveiled it. I think that God must have had a grand old time in fashioning the different animals that we see now, from the long necked giraffe to the fat hippopotamus. I was always entranced with the notion that God was so incredibly creative that he could think up a world where all those wonders exist. As I got older and began to battle with the realities of creation, I took a severe apologetic approach to the whole matter. I lost myself in trying desperately to disprove evolution and to make sure that if and when I got into debates that I would come out looking smarter than my opponent. I had statistics and witty comments to make on a wide variety of topics concerning creation and I was a force to be reckoned with. As I grew older still and entered the world of college I was again taken to a state of wonder as I examined biology, anatomy, chemistry, geology, and astronomy. The natural sciences were breathtaking and learning even more about the intricacies of the natural world renewed my high opinion of our Creator. I've kept up with science over the years and would read each new article concerning the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle and the Large Hadron Collider. I would read about science looking into the far corners of the galaxy and discovering new solar systems. I’ve always been a big science fiction fan and I love that idea that there might be something else out there, even if this is bad theology. I could've gone into a field of study that concerned the cosmos and I even went to summer space camp when I was younger, but as I matured in my faith I realized that while knowledge of creation is good, knowledge of the creator is better. Then as I went into seminary I was hoping to be wowed and amazed all over again, but something funny happened. Instead of looking at the breadth and depth of God it became an academic study of the regenerate or unregenerate Paul in Romans 7. It started becoming about who was right, Calvin or Augustine? I found myself in bitter discussion with friends about the nature and degree of predestination and what the correct hermeneutical interpretation of Luke 16 really is. And somewhere along the way God fell from the sky and from nature and landed solidly into my textbook and that’s where he stayed. It’s hard to see the forest when you’re busy cataloging and dissecting the trees. But as I looked and really thought and prayed over the passage of creation, flickers of memories came back like scenes from a movie I've lived through. I was reminded of the tears that streaked down a friend’s face as he and I sat on a rock and watched the sunrise over a valley completely uninhabited by man. I was reminded of a night in Alaska when I saw the sky shimmer an alien green as traces of the northern lights meandered across the sky. I thought of sitting on the ruins of an abbey in Whales and finding a peace there that seems to escape me in the daily rat race. I was reminded of a time where I stepped out of a hut in small village town in the middle of the Ecuadorian jungle and looked up and saw the night sky. It was bright and blazing and I felt like if I looked too hard into it I’d lose my grip on gravity and fall into an illuminated universe and go careening into the Milky Way. I looked back at those times and saw that they were good. I get it. After every day God looked on his creation and saw that it was good, and I couldn't agree with him more. I have every intention of finishing my degree and I will have a ready answer if a student asks me where I stand on the order of decrees. I’ll be able to share my opinion on the triune nature of God and I’ll be able to explain why I ascribe to the day-age view of creation. I’ll do all that and what’s more I’ll be able to tell people why I see God in his works of nature. Why I look at the ocean in its seeming infinity and the moon on its path through the sky and why I know that God must have created all of that, because when I look at it I can see that it’s good. Why I’ll be able to look at my wife knowing that God created us individually and to be together and I know that it’s good. When my father told me to keep it simple there’s a truth there that cannot be quantified or calculated, it’s the call to know what the Bible says and why it says it, without losing the wonder of why it even has to say anything at all.