a good spring thaw ...

Do you find yourself feeling a certain way and then you read something and realize that someone else, someone outside your story, has put perfect words to something that you thought was indescribable? My friend Jeff wrote this about 3 years ago. I printed it out and have kept it in my journal or my Bible since then. I re-read it again last night and it resonated deep within me. It just fits beautifully with how I feel right now.


With the gray of the morning, I am ashen too, and forever at odds, it seems, with who you are as if the breathing in of One who just is holds no bearing, no advantage, no explanation.

Yet I write, for this art must paint you. My design is known by you, as is my longing to contain you and bring form to the formless, to rip light and its shadows from voids, to color the dull.

Fall down upon me now and create the weight of something – anything – for me to bear a piece of you. Draw near in some fashion, beyond these whimsies and conjecture, for this appetite will not be satiated with trinkets or toys. Put skin upon your flock and multiply their numbers; time their rhythm with mine, for I crave some companionship, this day, of the supernatural sort.

Bring tension to this story, I beg; release some rising action that will at once invite resolution and a looming epilogue to cap this enduring, timeless struggle.

I am crushed into the realization that my humanity, more often that not, bears no resemblance to that which you intended. I should daily die but, instead, every other day perhaps, I grasp and claw and fight my way into my will of living, the very resolve that is manmade, centric focused, self-fulfilling.

Reveal yourself to me once more, for I’m thrashing about beneath these wanderings and taunted endlessly by one who hides you from me. Offer peace to these members and calm to this spirit; cocoon me away in your infinite reality, for musings of the human sort render no such comfort.

I am tired. I am beaten. My eyes grow weary and blurred; my breathing becomes labored at times. My legs are heavy as I climb the stairs toward something, anything, above and beyond this moment.

I watch as the chapters of this story reach their glorious heights only when I realize quite shockingly that I am not the Author. Yes, surprisingly, you do a much better job than someone such as me, with my feeble existence, my limited tolerance, my pathetic shell. Even as I write this, I plead for something, anything to help me describe you.

Help me depict you, because as it is, my mind bounces this way and that as I cower at the thought of you. My writing is sporadic, stunted, all over the place, yet nowhere as I try to capture you, as I search to contain you.

As I get out my bucket and shovel and begin to work on my sand castle, you form a mountain with your bare hands. While I retrieve my crayons and my construction paper, you sweep your fingers across the sky and make a prism of color unlike any other. While I blow hot air, you breathe into the wind and engulf me into your embrace. While I puff on my horn and beat my drums, you summon nature to cascade and ripple and resound with the harmony of the ages.

You shock me, beckon me, and pull me by the ear. You embrace me, tap me on the shoulder, smack me on the bottom to get in the game. You place your hand on the small of my back, or turn me to face you. You stand in front of me, beside me, shield me, and nurture me. You even get out of my way.

You give me a free will to sin and so I do. But as one sin falls on top of another and they multiply and grow arms and legs and tentacles you never stop taking me back. I am wounded, limping for a lifetime, in fact, but there you are, down the road, on one knee, weeping as I run toward you. You’re so happy that I’m back. I run so fast to you that I knock you over when I get there, and we laugh.

Your lap is imminently ready to be crawled into, your chest large and comfortable to lay my head. You sit at my table, occupy my grief, and circumvent my catastrophes.

But I can’t mistake you for any other. No, I dare not try because you will deafen with thunder and you will rebuild kingdoms and you will not trifle with sin. Yours is a mighty fist attached to a muscular arm that keeps this planet in motion. I shudder at the reality that you are.

I try to capture the beauty of you, but no frame can contain you.

Your love is overwhelming, nearly as vast as you are. You prepare and execute a cosmic change in plans and summon your own beautiful Son to walk this earth and ride through my imagination. To fix a horrible mess that in mankind; a horrific mess that is me.

Then you turn your back on him. You reject him, your first and only born; your beloved Son, yes, just for me.

So, as I write this, I am tired and I am beaten, but oh! how thankful, how awestruck I should be!

I was not meant to prop myself up, to cling to artificiality, to pigeonhole my way, I was not designed to muscle out of this box. I am fearfully and wonderfully made and I must – yes, today I must – find my weakness made strong in all that you are.

So throw back the curtains, let the light pierce the corners! Smack the space rugs and let me watch the dust cascade and tumble into the cleansing wind. Unshackle the back porch and invite in the subtle and benign breezes. Take off the storm door of this heart and soul and hang the wind chimes once again to perform their dance, to find their part in this great orchestra.

Unfold and unravel me! Search me deep within. Turn me upside down. Find me unholy, unworthy, unabashed; and take every square inch and reconfigure me.

Reshape and retool me. Sweep away the cobwebs of bitterness, indecision, judgment and pride. Forgive in me the dusty shadows of winter, the cold and frost-covered center of my being.

Transform me to your design so that I can join in the rapture of the season.


(All emphases are the original author's)