Wakefulness

I don’t usually deal with wakefulness.
Something is stirring now, though,
And I wake after four hours, or six,
And I find myself wondering what’s up
In the heavenlies,
On earth,
As the year
Runs out.

Accumulated Failures

When my oldest was born,
I assumed I would make sure he
Memorized much scripture,
Prayed diligently for the lost,
Maybe even evangelized some.

Life happened.

I read today about two children who prayed
Every day
For a missionary and five villages
Who had yet to respond to the gospel.

Only five years later,
Those villages were transformed.

It took us five years just to build a house.

Maybe I have an idea for a New Year’s
Resolution.

Being Known

To be known means that
When something happens to you,
Others know the significance
Because they know your story.

So when my friend said,
“I would take that guy’s life,”
That meant, in part, that any future
Singleness

Did not have to mean desolation and defeat,
But faithfulness and usefulness—
Life suffused with the goodness of God
And the fellowship of the saints.

Temporary

When the boys are all in bed,
I start to feel a little twitchy
For some transcendence
Or at least a little creativity.

So I might read a poem,
Or I might write a poem,
Until my soul is mollified
For one day more.

Pinochle Neophyte

When Grandpa explained that
A king and queen was a marriage,
Jadon asked if a jack and king was

A bachelor party.

Hashtag for the Year

I used to ask for a word for the year,
A simple summary of where a person has been.

Perhaps a hashtag is a better request,
Offering a medium for a few words.

Not everyone has a good year.
And there is space for sigh, for enigma.

But what joy for #released, #affirmation,
#thankfulrestoration, #mypeople.

God is at work, and we celebrate
How he was at work this year.

God Tells a Man

Siberian winter,
Pastor in prison,
Wife and children hungry.

God tells a man: go.
Man protests: may die.
God tells the man:
Don’t have to come back.
Just have to go.

Man went.
Wife and children saved.
Man returned
To tell this story.

Success not guaranteed.
Obedience required.

Humbly, I receive this lesson.

First Friday

A friend hosted First Friday parties.
She skipped December and January,
Those holiday months,
And April for tax season, July for the 4th.

But the other eight months,
Church friends and work friends,
Young and old, mingled at her house
Until the wee hours.

A small gathering to anticipate with joy.

Art Defined

Art is exactitude winged by intuition.

I think of exactitude as photorealism,
Not the fantastic mosaics of color
And scrawls of cats of Paul Klee.

And yet his definition charms me,
A combination of precision with
Flight of fancy and inspiration.

I start each poem with a wisp
And wait to see what mind
And fingers create.

Like the Mayo Clinic

A friend from China is here on a work visa.
There, he was a neurosurgeon,
Trained in Shanghai at one of their top five hospitals.
“It would be like the Mayo Clinic.”

Neurosurgery, a discipline so demanding that
A third of the hopefuls quit before graduation.

He came to do research in America,
And finds himself, at forty,
Doing residency in the Bronx,
Working with gunshot wounds and knife wounds.
It is so other, like a third country to dwell in.

Although I am not a neurosurgeon,
I, too, have found myself in an unexpected place
That feels entirely unsuited,
That does not recognize my gifts or my brilliance.

I have wanted someone to widen their eyes
In belated astonishment that I was trained in a place
Like the Mayo Clinic.

Pedagogy

An answer to the common question,
“Why must I learn this?”

Etwas bleibt hangen.

Roughly:
Something remains.
Something sticks.

You will remember but a small fraction
Of all that you learn.
But part remains

And you may yet find it useful
Unexpectedly.

Baptism

Years ago, my mom wondered
Why Jesus needed baptism.

John came, preaching
Baptism of repentance for
The remittance of sins.
Jesus didn’t need that.

Today, an answer, from
The Muslim world.
Baptism offers community,
A family, a place to belong.

“I have come home.”

Unexpected

This year I went to a meeting with a friend,
In pretentious grocery store Wegmans,
Expecting doubt, sin, pain, tears, fear,
Anger, grief, and, eventually,
Prostration.

Instead I found:
Belief, confession, repentance,
Forgiveness, prayer, reconciliation,
Laughter, and, eventually,
Peace.

I had gone expecting the taint of the world.

I returned having witnessed
The transforming power of God.

Memory

All my life people have commented on my memory.
In elementary school, I would astound my parents.
In my majority, friends sometimes warn,
Don’t tell Amy anything unless you want her to ask you
Follow up questions years later.

I don’t intend my memory to be a weapon.

We all wrote memories for our mother.
The other three wrote broad strokes, cheery, funny, sweet.
And mine, though people laughed, were perhaps not so nice.
I hadn’t realized it.

Later, we talked about money memories.
Once I was baby sitting and the children cut my
Toilet paper “cast” off my leg and accidentally cut my stockings.
I remember the horror of the waste in the moment,
Trying to keep the slits hidden from their mother.
And at home, my mother: “Whatever you earned this afternoon
Would hardly cover the price of the stockings.”
My fears were realized. In trying to keep the rowdy children
Occupied, I had failed. All those miserable hours, wasted.

My sister: do you have no nice memories?

The question ricochets in my head.

Are not the most vivid memories the bad ones, for us all?
I know my Dad read to us, and my parents sacrificially paid for school.
I know I had birthday parties and Christmas presents.

But my most vivid memories are the ways that I have failed.
I left my mittens on the city bus my junior year.
My glasses case fell out of my backpack on the plane four years later.
Even writing these failings makes my stomach hurt.

I don’t intend my memory to be a weapon.

But I suppose it is, sometimes turned on others,
And sometimes turned on me.

So Little

A new baby. Heart murmur.
This is where I come in:
Designated sitter
During doctor visit.

Doctor sends to specialist.
This is where I come in,
Offering nothing but pie
And companionship
While the realization sinks
Deep and deeper
That the planned trajectory
Of the immediate future
Has changed.

So little to offer.

Superficial

One book said, “Everyone is broken sexually.”
I don’t know if that is entirely true,
But it sounds reasonable.

And yet it seems to me there is a great distance
Between friendship and the marital embrace.

It’s not enough to say with Paul, “Flee fornication.”
The basic rule is not sufficient:
We also need to put up additional boundaries:
Make sure no one breaks the rule.

Girls, no friends with guys. If you’re dating, fine,
But once married, no more.

And the more superficial, the better.

Elena

Senior year, I’d sleep over at least once a week.
We’d listen to Santana and the Eagles,
Eat tortillas with avocado and salt,
Watch Poirot and Sherlock Holmes movies.
Your Dad would make us laugh.

We’d go to bed and pray
For our friends and our problems.
I loved it.

You created all the time: drawing, painting,
Pottery, poems. (Not knitting, though we tried.)
We built up a collection of inside jokes.
You married on our sixth anniversary.

You remember my birthday every year.
Whenever we talk, we connect.
How rich I am to have such a friend.

Christmas Eve Open House

My sister asked God to bring
The people who would be blessed
To come,
And to keep all from getting stuck.

I think that prayer was answered.

Cheesecake, lemon bars, cupcakes;
Beer, wine, cider, cocoa;
Talk, laugh, card trick, air guns;
Songs: new, old, famous, original,
Birthday.

For those who came and shared
Almost eleven hours of one of my
Favorite days of the year:
Thank you for expanding our family circle.
Thank you for loving us
And letting us love you.

Our hearts are full.

All She Could

I swam year-round in high school,
Practicing next to teens who would
Win scholarships, go undefeated,
Represent their country in the Olympics.
I could do whatever they could do in practice.
But in meets, I was not a serious competitor.

New to the sport, I missed qualifying for state
My freshman year. A year later,
I caught the flu mid-season. Still recovering,
Less than a half second kept me from qualifying.
My team in the pool won state
While I sat in the stands.

I transferred teams and transferred schools then.
And either my junior or my senior year,
I was, again, so close to state times,
But not quite there.

My Mom found a coach and paid for a private lesson.
Whatever minor adjustments he made
To my flip turns, my arm strokes,
Was sufficient to allow me to qualify,
Which, in the end, was all I wanted.

She always did all she could
To make our dreams come true.

Anime

We talked about watching Summer Wars.
Grandpa asked, “What is that?”
“An anime movie. It will make you hip.”

While Grandpa rolled his eyes,
Abraham said, “No thanks. I already have two.”
And, in response to our questioning looks:

“Hips.”

He has quite the dry wit.

Rejected Transplant

Friends, beautiful, intelligent,
Ready to learn and engage,
Were sent away. They left,
Sorrowing.

We still feel like our "body" of Christ is there.
We feel we attempted a transplant,
And the body here is rejecting our part.
(Though it should accept it,
Because the blood is the same!)

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lowly exile here

Until the Son of God appear.

December Sun

The weeks around the winter solstice,
The baby awakes me every morning to a surprise.
The sky out the window glows pink and yellow.

I had always thought of the sunrise colors as
Stripes of variation, a magical combination of glory,
Until I read that the sun illuminates the
Underside of clouds.

Now the glory has vocabulary,
And I make sense of what I’m seeing.
But the sense has not destroyed the magic,
But enhanced it, as what I can see is lit
By what is yet hidden.

If I can stay abed long enough,
I can witness even the sun rising.

Stable

”Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”

If I think of the Christmas season,
I can’t think of one I haven’t enjoyed.
Why, then, the Scrooge spirit within?

Christ came! We celebrate the waiting world’s
Consolation, even as we recognize
That Mary’s joy would end in grief.

Present Opening

Caleb, just over a year,
Is ready for present opening.
He finds the edge of the paper,
Tears a piece, stands up,
And walks it carefully to the place he chooses.
When he has another small piece, it joins its elder,
And this clean, precise dance
Repeats
Until we are all desperately impatient
And help.

Integrated

We went to our friend’s Christmas party a couple days ago. Our friend Andrew Lynn. It was a pretty fun party.

He and our friend Olivia, another one of our friends, decided to give us this awesome Christmas present. It's Batman. It's got a steamroller....

The most frequent question
Most homeschoolers face is
“What about socialization?”

Do most eight-year-olds
Describe men and women
A decade or two older as
“Our friends”?

Mine does.

A Grim Door

It may be for us the door to Aslan’s country and we shall sup at his table tonight.

My friend’s mother is dying,
Has been dying for eighteen months,
A physical deterioration until she cannot sup
Or evacuate, or speak.
Perhaps even eyelid communication will soon end.

The grief over the loss of a mother remains,
With the added grief
And exhaustion of caring long
For a terminally ill woman.

And I cry out with my friend:
Jesus, be gentle!

No Photo

My friend’s grandfather is dying,
Today or tomorrow.
In the new year, they had planned
To take a photo with the Senior, the Junior,
The Third and the infant Fourth.
Now that will not happen.

And the grandfather is old
And it is his time,
But we can share in the sorrow
That there were four generations
With the same name
And soon there will be only three,
Without even a photo to commemorate.

Abundance

In college, I got hooked on butter.
I heard a lecture that you should leave
Teeth marks in the butter when you eat bread.
Perfect.

My friend knows my love for butter,
And she sent me a butter dish
Like a bouquet, with flowers in
Bright colors, different patterns,
And a red knob on top like a little round hat.

A colorful jewel in a pleasing shape
To decorate my table and gladden my heart.

I will eat butter and feel loved.

Aslan Confusion

When, near the end, free Narnians are enslaved,
Talking trees cut down,
They submit because they don’t understand Aslan.
“He’s not a tame lion.”

And because it had been seven generations
Since Aslan appeared,
And because the animals desired faithfulness,
They behave beautifully, yet wrong.

Aslan would not destroy his handiwork.
Aslan would not enslave his people.
And though it’s true that he is not a tame lion,
He still acts in accord with his character.

Slant Answer

Years back, three friends went on a missions trip.
They feared that the time would be wasted.
I prayed for that trip before and during.

My prayers seemed unanswered.

Years later, I learned that the relationships formed
During that ridiculous and poisonous trip
Were vital through some dark days.

Were my prayers unanswered?

I look back through the years.
My circle of friends has increased from the three,
So of the seven who went,
I count seven dear friends.

I could say that my prayers were answered
Slant.

Humbly, O God, I thank you.

Six Against the Train

When I was in high school,
Six students left a party.
The drunk driver tried to race a train.
He lost.

Six students didn’t make it home.

Sick

When my son threw up, I wondered:

Did he throw up because he was sick?
Or just because he hadn’t eaten all day?
And had he not eaten because he was sick?
Or because he was picky? Or distracted?

And it seems he’s been under the weather for some time.
Or was that his brother? Or three brothers? Or four?
It seems, over the last weeks, I’ve heard reports of
Headache, fever, exhaustion, sinusitis;
I’ve seen vomit and runny noses,
Heard coughs, both deep and shallow,
Had a sore throat myself.
(But was that sickness or simply too much reading aloud,
Or maybe dehydration?)

When I only vaguely notice a plethora of symptoms
Among seven people for several weeks,
And I didn’t start tracking who suffered from what, when—
Does that make me distracted and inept?
Or simply practical?
Few people die from a cold.

I’m not sure if this is confession or justification.

Letter to Myself

A college professor assigned us
A letter to ourselves.
He promised to mail them
Five years hence.

(One wit asked if we should add
Seven one cent stamps
To keep up with the inevitable
Increase in postage.)

The letter never reached me,
Even though I’d addressed it
To my parents and they didn’t move.
Either the professor died,
Or tossed the bundle of letters,
Ignoring his promise.
That makes me a little bit mad.

Even at the time, though,
I found the exercise
Unsatisfactory.

What could my senior year self,
In the first year of marriage,
Possibly have to say to the unknown older Amy?
I would have wanted to impart something
Lovely and profound,
And instead I felt the weight of the stilted comments,
Tongue-tied to myself.

Softball

The piece of us that a person sees
Is not always representative.

I remembered recently
A request an acquaintance made:
Join the church softball team.
I said no. She begged. I caved.

Almost two decades later,
Even the thought of that
Makes my heart pound.
Shame stains my cheeks.

I don’t do team sports.
I had no desire to stand where
A pitcher hurled a ball.
Why did I say yes?

I don’t think I paid for my jersey.
I never made it to a practice, let alone a game.
I didn’t return calls requesting my presence.
Did they field a team without me?

I was, in most respects, a dependable teen.
But if you had asked the organizer
She would have said anything but.
It shook my perception of myself.

The piece of us that a person sees
Is not always representative.

The Silver Chair

My dislike for The Silver Chair
Stretches back to childhood.
The intensity of
The man-eating giants,
The woman become snake,
The underground imprisonment.

But mostly, I see now, the horribleness,
For one who longs to be perfect,
Of an imperfect beginning,
An imperfect middle,
Of having four instructions and muddling three.

As an adult, I still found myself raging
At the injustice of the difficulties of the signs,
At the physical challenges,
At the lack of clarity.

Perhaps this one suffers from abundant verisimilitude.
Reading is not escape if you recognize yourself and your failures.

And yet, I noticed something else as I read.
Despite their imperfection, their very real failures,
All worked out.

They missed help from Caspian,
Gained help from Puddleglum.
Missed “Under Me,”
But had a night when they slept warm and dry.
Fled for their lives,
Found the way anyway.

The timing worked out precisely in every way.

If a human author can orchestrate such a story,
I expect God can, as well.

Let not the same charge be leveled:
“Four babies playing a game can make a play-world
Which licks your real world hollow.”

I expect God’s world is better than we can ask or
Imagine.

Wish Fulfilled

“Do you mean to say,” asked Caspian, “that you three come from a round world (round like a ball) and you’ve never told me! It’s really too bad of you. Because we have fairy-tales in which there are round worlds and I always loved them. I never believed there were any real ones. But I’ve always wished there were and I’ve always longed to live in one. Oh, I’d give anything—I wonder why you can get into our world and we never get into yours? If only I had the chance!”

Seventy years and another book later,
The recently deceased and now restored Caspian
Repeats his wish for
Just one glimpse of their world.

Wish fulfilled.

Such a small wish to hold over decades.
Such a gentleness to have it fulfilled,
Even as it worked Aslan’s purpose,
“The Healing of Harms.”

The potential leaves me breathless,
That even a small wish can have a purpose,
That even a lion can grant a request.

Remote Control

Jadon runs his remote controlled car
Across the floor.
Caleb chases it.

Jadon stops the car,
Backs it up.
Caleb grabs it.

Caleb offers it to Jadon,
Who thanks his brother,
Takes the car,

And they do it all again.

Release

As we shared our word for the year,
My long-time friend, now moving away,
Said not, as I expected, “Change,” but

Release.

This picture, for me, of an arrow,
Aimed and let go, flying to a target.

This picture, for her, of a leaf,
That grew green in its time,
That now, as the season changes,
Is ready to let go,
Not grip tightly to the tree
Long after the weather says
Release.

12/13/14

A new century offers many dates of beauty,
And I have saluted them in their turn:
01/01/01 on up to 12/12/12,
Including a son’s birth on 08/08/08;
The sequence dates like
01/02/03 or 07/08/09.
These have made me happy.

And on this day, the last of the sequences
Of this century,
I took a long nap
And I read some Narnia with my sons;
I watched my friends dance,
And I ate with my friends and laughed.

Should the world still stand
A century from now,
I could hardly hope for a better day
On this date
For my descendants.

For Another

A friend said,
I had no need to see this person who hurt me
Ever again.
That chapter was closed.

But I realized it was a kindness to the other
To allow the meeting,
To allow the formal asking of forgiveness
And granting.

It was a sign of growth that I could be
Both honest and gracious.

Boarding House

I lived in a boarding house for a year:
One of ten tenants who shared a house
With a family of six.
I loved it.

We like people and feeding people,
So we considered duplicating that
In Boulder. We failed to find a house
That worked. And who wants so much debt?
And do we really like people that much?

It's an intriguing idea for a life, though!

Half a Year

After taking some good-natured ribbing
About half-birthday celebrations,
The question came up:
Do you actually celebrate the half?

January 30 is my birthday.
I have always just jumped six months ahead,
Counting July 30 as my half birthday.

But mathematically, the half doesn’t come
Until August.

This is not quite an existential crisis.

But it did keep me up late one night,
Thinking about the people born
August 30 and 31 (and, three out of four years, 29):
They have no half birthdays
As I celebrate them,
And are forced to count by number of days.

Really, though, to celebrate
Half of 365.25
In any way is a bit silly.

Brilliant

”In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

I am made of mostly water
And a whole bunch of elements,
But I am more than that.

I love the distinction between
Material composition and
Reality.

Reading

Lying on the bed, working on a book,
I looked next to me to find
Caleb, on his back,
Paperback book in the air above him,
Pages open,
Babbling away as he
Read aloud.

Binary

Adam and Eve ate from the tree
Of the knowledge of good and evil.
Not the tree of evil.

Perhaps this means:
Let me know what is right and wrong.
Let me know the law.

The tree of life was open to them—
Until they ate the other.

If we look at the nature of man:

The world, it seems, says
Basically good.
The church, I think, says
Basically evil.

But what if the question was not that binary?

What if the question is:
Do you choose life?

Why Did That Make You Cry?

And when they looked at her they thought they had never before known what beauty meant.

I have read this book often enough
That two sentences before that line,
I had to swallow back tears.
And after I read it,
The boys asked, bemused,
“Why did that make you cry?”

Why, indeed.

Because who of us knows such beauty,
And yet don’t we all want to?

Because I know that this girl will marry the king,
Will have a son,
Will be bit by a serpent and die.

Her beauty will go out of the world.

Not that Narnia is a real world.
Yet she is a real character,
And I grieve her loss,
And the loss of those who love her.

I didn’t say any of that to my sons,
Ages six, eight, and ten,
As they waited to hear
What happens next.

We Laughed Till We Cried

Phil, please don’t die.
I don’t think I would find someone else
Who likes me as much as you do.

I think you overestimate
My esteem for you.

Touché!

Demas

Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica.

A friend mentioned this.
It’s a harsh verse.
It makes me catch my breath.

Did Demas long for movies and chocolates,
Or whatever other pleasures of the world,
And so went off to pursue them,
Finding the gospel less satisfying?
That is how I have read this verse in the past.

Or did he simply grow weary of laboring
Without much result?
Paul’s imprisonment, perhaps, not quite what he expected.

And I wonder: would I desert Paul?

Life long daily faithfulness:
A stiff demand.

A Constraint

Reading again The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, not our favorite,
We discussed how thin the conceit that holds the book together,
How much we prefer interwoven novels to episodic.

And yet there is something satisfying about reading an entire episode
In an evening,
As we did with Eustace as a dragon.

What struck me was the gold bracelet,
Biting into his flesh, until he tore his arm with his teeth for the misery.
Constant. Painful. A reminder that this was not what he should be.

A constraint.
And it drove him, in the end,
To the place of healing.

Celebrate

Though I have never heard anyone in real life use
Fructify,
I occasionally read it,
Usually when writers don’t want to use the word
Pregnant.
All those Victorian-era inhibitions.
(What a world we live in.)

I would like it, though, were God to
Make fruitful and productive
Our farm,
Our labors,
Our minds,
Our hearts.

All true.

But I also sort of just want to celebrate that word
Fructify.

And now I have.

All Flame

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”

Sometimes I pray with people.
Deep pain surfaces, long-held lies.
Jesus brings truth and light,
Peace and direction.

A friend asked me what I do
During those prayers.

And it was hard to answer.

Eyes closed, I see nothing but blackness.

I listen with all my inner ear,
For the next question.

Sometimes we sit in silence.
Tears drip off my chin.

My right palm grows hot and heavy,
But not sweaty and not tingly.

Sometimes the top of my head feels open,
So that I feel like a pipe runs
From my head out my palm,
Flowing with the Holy Spirit.

I have, at times, grown vertiginous.
I have, at times, been unable to move,
Almost unable to catch my breath.
Almost overwhelmed.

It is the most present, most demanding,
Most intense experience I know.

And when peace that passes understanding comes,
My hand remains hot for a while,
And I pray again,
And we sit, prostrate,
Astonished at the presence of God
We have seen and felt.

Define the Relationship

After a summer of hanging out with friends,
And a few long dinners together, just us two,
Phil wondered where I saw this going.

I could see us getting married someday.

And that is the difference between us two.
You could see yourself marrying me someday.
I could see myself marrying you tomorrow.

That was our first conversation about our relationship.

We told this story to a friend,
And she laughed and said,
I know Phil, and so of course that’s the way
The conversation would go.

Best Moment

Some of my sons don’t remember Prince Caspian.
I read to them the familiar story.

“Have patience, like us beasts.
The help will come.
It may be even now at the door.”

More than one delighted boy stopped me to point out:
“Mom, the help is there! It really is at the door!”
And they jumped in excitement and joy.

The irony is the delight:
The help is listening
To the stated faith that help might be coming.

Maybe that is a lesson for all who are looking for help:
Open the door.
See what is even now waiting.

Molars

After I’d had a scant half hour sleep,
Caleb woke me.
Too stuffy to nurse well,
He started to scream in panic.

He peed in the pot, screaming.
He pooped in the pot, screaming.
I dosed him. He screamed.
I held him. He screamed.

I don’t do screaming babies,
So even twenty minutes is a long time.
Long enough that Phil got up to ask
If he was okay. He will be, in the end.

And I stood holding him
As the clock struck one,
He in red shirt, me in green,
Christmas colors without Christmas cheer.

He looked scared.
We both looked tired.
Molars: they have to come in,
But it’s no fun while they do.

Helpfulness

I stopped reading to the boys midway through a sentence.
Was Caleb actually throwing away his board books?
Yes. He was.

I fished out the three that had already nestled among torn plastic packaging,
Then pulled the garbage bag over so Caleb could continue.

He strutted back and forth from shelf to trash basket,
Broad grin, proud that he was enhancing the orderliness of the home.

Did I mention that yesterday he found a blanket in the bag of our guests
And brought it to them for their son. They didn’t need it, but they received it.

It was the first true act of service I have seen of him.
He walked away, head high, smile big, satisfied that he contributed.

As, indeed, he had.

Fig Tree

But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.

For months, I had been tempted to purchase a fig tree.
I would walk past them at the grocery,
Check on them online.
I resisted the temptation, barely.

We had sheep then, and the sheep had to go.
The final one loaded, the buyer pulled out a fig tree
With one small fig, a promise of more to come.

“God told me to get you a fig tree.
They weren’t easy to find this time of year,
But I finally found a place that still had one.”

How to tell him that that had deep meaning for me?
How to say to this stranger strongly enough,
Thank you for hearing and obeying the voice of God,
To bring me this gift, this message.

It astounds me even now that a fig tree can speak,
That a man can be the voice of God.

Amy

I.
I hope it does not make you dislike your name
If I point out how much I appreciate
The beautiful shape of “Amy” on the printed page.
A letter at an angle above the line,
A letter, both straight and curved, in the middle,
And a letter at an angle below the line.
Compact and perfect.
(I’m sure your name is nice, too.)

II.
And I hope it does not disappoint you
If I mention more to appreciate.

Only three letters, but two syllables.

Twice as many vowels as consonants.

Composed of the first letter of the alphabet,
A letter in the precise middle,
And final letter the second to the last.
Beginning, middle, end.

It is not elegant or unusual,
But cheery, energetic.
More freckles than lace,
More fun than mellifluous.
I think it suits me.

And “Amy” means “beloved” and that is very nice.
(But really: I’m sure your name is nice, too.)

Clementines

When I packed Phil his lunch every day,
I would peel his Clementines.
It was a little treat for me:
I’m amazed every time by their easy peeling.
And Phil doesn’t like getting his hands sticky.

A coworker asked once:
“Do your oranges come that way?”

Another answered:
“Only when you’re married to Amy.”

Calling

A friend said, Though I knew God,
I was not living faithfully.

My girlfriend didn’t know God.

Then God called us both,
And we spurred each other on.
Now live faithfully.

I love to hear how God is at work.

No Preference

A friend said
About a major life choice,

I wanted to reach a place
Where I would have been content either way.

And when I reached that place,
God spoke clearly, and I knew what to do.

At Last

Caleb brings me his shoes,
Then tries to escape out the open door.

His brothers joined him and blew bubbles for hours.
He wandered around, smile on his face.

At last I have an outdoors boy.