Anytime you say anything,
Do you say everything?
If not, then why do you
Take what I said
As if that were
The whole of my position
On the entirety of
Everything in existence—
As if my silence at the moment
On other matters
Were an indictment against them?
The older I get,
The more I understand that
The greatest aspiration
A person could possibly have
Is not any of the things
So many of us might think it is
At various times in our lives.
It is not the aspiration to
Fame or fortune,
Power or popularity,
Leadership or success,
Or to be
Unique or unpredictable.
We all deal with life’s daily troubles, frequently without giving them a second thought. They are common place to us—the bills, the squabbles, the sicknesses. When these things happen, provided we still find them manageable, we don’t often switch into panic mode, but take a calmer approach to getting through it.
When really tragic things happen, however, we can lose our minds and behave as if this world were supposed to trouble-free after all. This latest school shooting incident is a good example, as school shootings normally are.
Continue readingPerhaps it will come as no surprise to anyone
That good writing takes good time.
What may surprise many, however, is
That good thinking takes good time, too—
Out in the wild,
Where no self-respecting city
Would want to live—
Where man seems the intruder,
And all his noise a sin—
One can discover—
If he has learned to quiet his soul
And sink himself into the grass—
That the Earth
Has something to say.
As it happens, some of us,
On our way through this life
Will work the great puzzles of this world,
And some will not.
People hold on to all manner of ideas
Throughout their lives—
Sometimes going decades without
Stopping to reconsider
Or to correct an erroneous one.
And this they often do
With no apparent effort,
Having performed no great feat
To hold the idea.
People do what they do,
Think what they think,
Decide what they decide,
And believe what they believe—
And with varying degrees of conviction
As to both the proper level
Of quality control for it all,
And the question of whether
They’ll ever have to
Give an account for it.
It seems I’ve met a million Christians
Who tell me that
The Holy Spirit enables them
In sound interpretation of scripture.
And it seems I’ve met approximately zero
Whose interpretation seems to be
Of other-worldly keenness—
Inerrant,
Authoritative,
Consistent.
Perhaps we do not really understand
This famous indwelling
Much at all.
She might boast, I suppose,
That she’s a thousand feet deep
And twelve times the size of Manhattan—
Or that she’s only twelve miles from
Those holy ruins—
Or that she’s fed by the famed and holy river—
Or that she is always calm,
And her waters warm—
