What if I were listening?
Trying to understand your words
Your meaning
Your desire―
To bend me to you,
Rather than you to me?
What if I were letting not my heart be troubled
But trusting in you
Leaning on you
Casting the dividing anxieties on you―
All of them―
Just like it says?
What if I were seeking with all my heart,
And not just some of it?
Leaving no stone unturned,
Making every effort,
Wholehearted
All-out
Not double-minded, but finally decluttered?
Is it not your promise
That this is when I would find you?
And if I do find you,
Will it be better
Than merely assuming that,
Having made a token effort,
I must have found you already,
Like the others constantly assure me―
However bland and lightweight the encounter?
What if I were to find in you a Presence
I’ve not yet been able to conjure up on my own?
What if there were a Power and Clarity in it
That surpasses what I have yet dared
To ask or imagine
Or to seek with all my heart?
What if the scarcity of my life
Were to be the actual fruit
Of my not-listening, not-seeking ways?
What if reason I have not is that I ask not?
What if the reason I lack the “life more abundantly”,
“Thirty, sixty, or a hundred times as much”
Were simply that I have never sown
The intended seeds?
What if you had actually been serious
About all these things,
And had really meant them,
And I had simply been assuming,
Quite stupidly
That it weren’t that demanding a process?
What if you were calling my bluff?
Having dared all this what-iffing,
I am left for the moment with
The troublingly-clear idea
That this is not going to come down
To the religion being complicated,
But to the fact that I have simply been
Unwilling to clear the World from my table
And focus only on you―
And that you have, in fact,
Kept me out until
I was all in.
