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Used by permission, copyright /RED EDGE IMAGES
I love the idea of greatness. I would love to be great–to be called up before throngs of people, to be heralded for a lifetime of something special. I revel in imaginary praise and adoration until I remember how badly it fits. I wear accolades like a four-year old strutting around in Daddy’s suit. The suit fills out with my pride, but while I’m in it, all I can do is strut. It’s too clumsy and heavy for me to run and jump and play and accomplish. Of course, I wasn’t made to wear it–it belongs to Daddy.
I admire people who can wear the suit without falling all over themselves. Then I think, maybe they don’t see themselves in this suit of adoration. Maybe they don’t see themselves or the suit at all. Maybe they’re just… in the moment.
Only Moments
People aren’t great
Only moments…
Great moments,
Which flash in the dark spaces of life…
When a person turns…
To reflect the light.
A glimmer of wisdom, a flicker of goodness…
Guiding lights…flashes of courage and strength.
Moments of Truth.
Moments of trust.
People aren’t great
They remember the moments with Pride…
And carry the memory into the dark spaces…
Thinking the light was theirs.
They spread the memory across the spaces…
And in their darkness they turn…
To reflect their Pride,
More often than the light.
Humility has no memory
It stands in the moment. Invisible…
Seeing only the light…
Of God.
People aren’t great
Only moments.
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In 1971, alone in a cow pasture, not far from Eastern Oregon College in La Grande, Oregon, I accepted the reality of Christ and surrendered my will to His. It was the summer of my senior year and for the first time in my life God was more than a mutable cosmic speculation. He was real; He was tangible; He was with me. I brought Him home, we ate together, and the next night God and I returned to the cow pasture with my sleeping bag and together we shared the adventure of trust. This is the record of that night:
Of Sleeping Near Woods
I hear a tapping in the woods.
Yet dusk hides it from my sight
Leaving it to my ears
And to my faith, that it means me no harm.
What causes the branches to crackle so?
My eyes can’t tell me.
And my ears tell me only that there are branches that crackle.
Yet, my faith tells me that it is a crackling in the woods.
And not of a branch that hands have touched.
And this if nothing else is good.
For nothing adorns the sound.
It is no less and no more than what it is.
It’s purpose for God and nature to know.
And it is mine, while not to see it,
Yet to believe.
In like manner:
I feel a prickling at the knee.
No doubt some bug descends on me.
My choice … to brush it off or not.
But for the dark I can’t see,
And were it just a blade of grass
It would prickle just the same.
No pain, but yet a presence.
Something besides me …
Having business with my knee.
What business it is I don’t know.
For what does it matter?
When, through its knowledge, I may be alarmed;
By faith it is merely a prickling.
While, in truth, it may have the means to give discomfort.
Still, by faith it does no harm.
And when I awake in the morning,
No scars upon my knee,
And the tapping sound had long since gone;
Yet, I wonder what may have lurked this night before?
Whether by wild beasts I was surrounded,
And my faith delivered me,
Or just a trick of winds and grass.
No matter … for what ever it was
God wrestled…
And won.
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Used by permission, copyright /RED EDGE IMAGES
He walked into my classroom, poetry in hand, with his tormented eyes, spiked, black-dyed hair, black trench-coat over black shirt and pants, hiding a disturbing array of silver spikes and chains. He was a brilliant high school student in my multi-media computer class in San Jacinto, CA., in the fall ’99. And his notebook was was full of anguish, torture and murder. I had thought we could connect over a shared interest in poetry, so I asked him to bring some of his work. I was to read some of his poems and respond with one of my own. The italicized lines below was my response and “The Challenge” tells the story…
The Challenge
He was Goth…poet-genius of despair, speaking anguish and death,
Exalting bitterness through the cosmic eyes of a child.
He spoke in poetry.
And I, using his language of torment, answered …
You felt the warm color fade from your eyes.
You saw the rose melt.
You said love had died.
The empty space child consuming your mind,
Savage sensations…
United in sorrow.
Hate overflowing, consuming tomorrow.
Trapped by believing, as the little child cried,
Yet unaware…
That the little child lied.
I returned his tortured verses …
Answer shrouded in hope.
But he read my answer, and ran, with a furtive glance…
Through eyes, clouded in confusion and fear…eyes I was seeing for the last time.
Time passed, the end had come.
Goth was dead.
The demon child banished.
The poet-genius of despair…
Stood before me…radiant with life, resurrected in hope
Rose reborn and alive with love
A newborn child of the Truth …
Set free. Born of the answer far beyond the scope of my words.
Leaving me with joy… and hope that I played a part.
……………….
He had come back to visit me in the spring and I didn’t recognize him at first. The black and the spikes were gone. He wore his natural brown hair, radiant eyes and a smile. He said he had found freedom in Christ and he glowed with transformation.
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