Bathing Beauty

After a fun hour in the grass, dirt, and mud,
I brought the baby in and stripped him down.
As he sat in the shallow tub water,
He asked for his rubber duck, using,

As always, only the initial consonant sound.
After he accidentally shot himself in the eye,
He figured out how to shoot water out
The hole in the bottom.

And it overwhelmed me, the desire
To capture forever the delight of his smile,
His wrinkled nose, his dripping eyelashes,
The wonder of discovery.

Whirlwind

…pressing the final chapters of Job in the direction of a radically christocentric interpretation that sees Job's silence at the end of the book as being filled with the pathos of one survivor bearing prophetic witness to the sufferings of another…

My friend faced loss upon loss,
Until she beheld her shards of faith
And considered walking away.

In Job, God speaks out of the whirlwind.
And my friend finally left
Her icy bubble of isolation

For the chaos of companionship
And mutual grief
And there she found God

Where he has always been.

When the Days of the Siege Are Fulfilled

I woke in the night, overwhelmed by need.
So much to make right;
So much beyond me.

I went, that day, to visit a friend.
God gives her scripture references,
And the verse applies.

Ezekiel 4:19 does not exist, but 5:2 does,
A strange verse about dividing cut hair into thirds
“When the days of the siege are fulfilled.”

I planned to research that some more later,
To figure out if this was actually a word,
When my friend asked God if there was anything more.

And the answer came immediately.
This was what the man would do at the end of the siege.
He would still be standing.

I had woken and felt besieged.
There would be enough for me until the end.
I, too, would still be standing.

If creative interpretations of Scripture make you nervous,
Perhaps it’s because you haven’t
Had God speak to you that way yet.

Lusitania

One hundred years ago today
The Lusitania went down.
She carried passengers and materiel,
No neutral ship she.

And whether her loss,
Or the Zimmerman telegram,
Or the projected loss of bankers’ investments
Finally incited United States to war,

We went. And won.
And planted the seeds of the next war,
Far worse.

No action stands alone.

Missing the Others

After nine days away,
After a late night flight,
After almost a week of constant illness,

Caleb was not ready to greet his brothers.
But in the morning, when they bounced in,
He smiled.

And when they put him on a blanket
And carried him sedan chair style,
He laughed.

And I thought—
There you are.

I think sometimes about the loss of a child,
And wonder about the devastation.

Considering my youngest was pining for his brothers,
And, frustrating as he can be,
They were clearly pining for him,

I suspect there are not words to imagine
The loss
Of one.

Let Me Go Home

It was not my choice to depart. I felt called.
I went with appreciation and expectation,
If not enthusiasm.
After all, I have a very nice life at home.

Every day away, I saw beautiful things.
Every day away, I had reason to be gone.
Even so, I returned with gratitude
To my own life, my own space, my own people.

My friends remain in a distant city,
Far from their people, their space,
Their life.
I cry out on their behalf, O God.

Abundance

Less than twenty-four hours prior,
I had bought my ticket.
Not even all my family knew I was in town.

I walked into church and saw
My best friend from high school.
She had been on her way to another church

But was running late and decided
En route
To visit this one.

And so I sat in that sanctuary,
Rich with the presence of the Lord,
And reflected

That I had been to church
With my friend
In high school, in college,

And now married, both of us with young,
As we held hands during the Lord’s prayer,
As we took communion one after the other.

This lavish gift,
Orchestrated by the Father,
Enjoyed during a teaching on the Father’s

Abundance.