Jack Pelham

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—

There comes that moment
In the consideration of a thing
When a man tells himself
He understands it.

It’s a funny thing about the writer—
Who knew how to put his finger
On something we could not—
To see a thing we had not yet seen—
To fill in the blanks
About which we had only wondered so far—

If he tastes and sees that the Lord is good,
Will he not take more?

Yet, year after year,
He takes no more—
So far as we can see—
Even as he assures us that
“The Lord is good, indeed!”
And makes excuses as to why
He is not full by now.

I re-post this 2021 post from my Facebook page in honor of my son James’ 19th birthday.

My son’s a man today, in conventional thinking. But he does not come by it suddenly. It did not come upon him all at once when the calendar turned over to his 18th year.

No, he learned part of manhood when I explained to him at 3 years old that the more he would obey, the more I could trust him—and that he’d get to do more things that way.He learned part of it when he and I buried his little sister together at the cemetery—when we made that task our own, rather than letting someone else take care of it for us.

He learned it through the spankings he got,

When has God ever—
That Almighty,
That King of Kings,
That Lord of Hosts,
That Creator of us all—

When has he ever,
In all his boundless power,
Made a man more righteous
Than the man was willing to be?

The more I learn how to ask good questions,
The more people I meet who avoid them,
Some of whom are those who do not seem
To like the answer, “I don’t know”,
And who will pretend that they do.

They are not the sort to be
Explorers,
Discoverers,
Examiners.
They have ruled out surprise.