looking through me

Tag: words

November 23, 2016

cushioning the hard

Some days are hard. The intangibles of the world’s incivility, the crescendo of chaos in the news, the crashing waves of heartache—they all pile on at once.

And when those days thread together to weave weeks of discomfort one after the other, the air itself begins to feel heavy.

This is one of those months . . . one of those seasons.

Under this weight, words seem so inadequate. They slip unformed off my tongue and elude my fingertips. My usual method of working out all the thoughts and frustrations falls away. Yet I notice my hand involuntarily reaches for the words of others, for the inky stanzas of hope painted by poets past and present.

I didn’t know how much the words meant until I glanced above my laptop and saw a wall of poetry framing my workspace. The unintended result of weeks of accumulating words—printed and jotted down on scraps, pinned and taped—to cushion all the hard.

And there on the corner of my desk—the place I store the books I slip into my purse each morning for stolen moments of reading while walking or eating—a Bible and a slim volume of poetry.

I don’t know when my words will return. I don’t know if civility will claw its way out of the ashes. I don’t know if love will overwhelm the hostility. I don’t know.

But for the first time in days I took a deep breath. A crack of light cleaved the darkness. A moment of peace shattered the noise.

Because beauty finds a way.

 

 

 

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May 10, 2016

cloud of witnesses

My eyes drifted east to the clouds piled in a heap on top of the mountains. Giant tentacles stretched out of it, thick offshoots snaking westward across the sky.

Directly beneath it the sun began to rise. A fiery flush of coral washed over the gray. Second by second the warm blush swept down the cloudy arms. The morning sky came alive.

Its brilliance infiltrated my prayer for our church, “Would You make us like that cloud—reflecting the Son’s glory—taking people’s breath away and drawing them to You? . . . Could we be like that? Could we be a cloud of witnesses?”

Oh! Is that what a cloud of witnesses looks like? I’d always pictured a solitary, massive column, an overwhelming thunderhead. I’d projected an ominous edge to the cloud—I don’t know why—but this . . . this was glorious. The incomparably richer reality before me reshaped the image in my mind.

By the time I pulled into my parking spot at work the cloud had faded to standard gray against an average morning sky. The radiance was gone, but the impression—the vision—remained.

The cloud is just a cloud, but the cloud in communion with the sun is breathtaking.

The church is just a bunch of people, but the church in communion with the Son is altogether holy. Lit by His magnificence, reflecting it outward, we become a living mystery—His constant canvas, His cloud of witnesses—drawing the eyes of others beyond ourselves to Him.

We do it imperfectly. Our glow fades, our unity wavers, our focus falters, our cloud drifts, and yet His mercies are new every morning.

Our mission is clear. Our Hope is here. Our Son is risen.

 

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