Promise
what if
you are accidentally-
on-purposefully
unfolding in time,
at just the right imperfect time,
your precious precarious life
a godgiven forgiven sacred trust,
a paradoxology of Love…?
perhaps
you are the vagabond kind
who wanders limping and lurching
the mud and ice of these endless winter fields,
desperate and longing
for the wide green sunlit swathe of june,
unaware that this whole time
god gave you his faded gardener’s rucksack
that you mistook for
the weight of the world
on your weary broken
now 80 year old back
and it has had a hole in it —
you have been flinging wildflower seeds
everywhere you go for decades
they were silently carelessly softly escaping,
welling up spilling out behind you
trailing, streaming behind you,
a dark cloud
of unknowing,
your wake of
promise.
~MB~
Beautifully said and written… thank you Melinda. Blessings~Jean
Melinda, thank you for sharing your gift with the spare words of poetry and the evocation they make!
I am struck today by the ways in which close attention to the shape of particular lives reveals much about the ways of divine presence in the world. Russell Stewart’s blog does this in a very different way this week. But your blog and his share that quality of attention to particularity.
Is that a part of faithful practice/mission/evangelism? I suspect so, but I don’t quite have words for how – yet.
Cathie
Yes, i think you are, in the words of Willie Wonka, (my favorite fictional evangelist) sucking on an everlasting gobstopper with this insight about faithful missional practices! one of the things i was saying with my poem was the unfinished nature of our Work here, it is a mission that is a seed planting, or a watering, as Paul writes about it in one of his letters. we judge our lives as broken and useless, and yet God is up to something heavenly nonetheless. the cross we bear is also a rucksack of wildflower seeds, that may fall on stony or icy ground, or on june’s eager sunlit fields… precious and full of promises that we have mostly been oblivious to. I think God’s mission is unfolding in the Grand Scheme of things beyond our Reach, and in the details of our particular heartaches and loves, in the agony of one Jewish vagabond man’s crucifixion, and through the weeping waiting Witness of his mother and friends.