Tag Archives: redemption

Rolled Over

Unhinged again by pain, the spins
Around my ears keep me queasy,
Exhausted, broken, hyper-aware:
Loving me is never easy.
Pulsing ache and fevered throes
Cluttered breaths over shattered shards
Wracked up, wrung out, run down
I fight my own worst regards
Only one friend who writes,
Only one who values me
In the stumbling, tumbling turmoil
Of the worst that I can be-
These whispers hiss and spit
Inside my throbbing ears:
Wasted! Worthless! Naught to show
For all these tarried years.
Oh the physical weakness,
Whenever I assume
I may stand and work and run
On the thin fumes I have presumed
Were the common breaths of man.

How can I run my race
When I can barely stand?
Yet I live, and breath, and move
Inside Your pierced hand

And that’s enough for me.

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Leap of Faith

If wishing for something
could make it true,
what a horror in which we’d abide
Yet I yearn for You
and the Kingdom that can’t divide.

Most wretched am I,
among all men
if You aren’t who You are.
Here I pursue these disciplines,
but my hope is fixed afar.

My resolve and my delight
nailed to the sticking point
of Your blood-stained cross
The wood you worked anointed
by the profoundest, grievous loss

and my redemption.
Every iota of who I’ve been or will be
is leaning on who You are now
How sorrowful I’d be, how silly,
if You fell through somehow

but You haven’t yet.
When I travail, when I ache,
when the brokenness of man,
and the rebellion, shake me
You take my hand, You stand

How blessed am I
above all mankind,
that You lead me into the vast unknown
You whisper ideas beyond my mind,
ways above my own,

You elevate me,
and You expose my sin
Dirty veils that hide my face,
until You clean, You defend,
and wrap me again in Your grace

and Your love,
tangible as a hen’s wings
stretched over her offspring
Solid as concrete
under my foolish, and sometimes faithful feet.


The Thief

Did he steal heaven too?
Hanging there, despised,
Hearing words his equal spewed,
His wounded gut felt the lies-
Fear God! Is it not clear
Who owes, and who gives?
Death is raging ever nearer;
Despair is wrenching as he lives
But he has seen a glimpse,
And hopes enough to beg-
His hobbled life limps
To the end of broken legs,
And he cries out, “Remember,”
In one desperate act of faith,
“Remember me!” as slumber
Slices through his days
And in the closed fist
And throes of agony,
Hanging by the wrist:
He met the Prince of Peace

How his heaviest, darkest hour
Must have also been his brightest.
In the suffering grip of evil powers,
He finds his weightless rest

The Light overcomes the darkness:
His worst hour becomes his best.


Fissure King

It stained everything
In the days I was shaken
Seeping from cracks
Ripped through the foundation.

Broken, I became
All ink stain and rubble.
Who pained to look on me
Invited trouble.

Days and distance
Stilled the quake
I still awake at night
Prone to shake

In the wake of the devastation
I have tasted:
The flesh and folly
Quaking wasted.

Who I am
Forever stained
Along the fissures
Carved like veins

By a mighty hand
I could not see,
Guiding these cracks
That had to be

But in the deepest chasm
Of fractured despair,
I found one small flower
Blooming fair

A fragile, fragrant blossom,
Unfamiliar to my sight,
And it’s nectar held the power
To put every fracture right.

I did not have it in me
To shut up the chasm deep,
To force the little flower
Into impotence and sleep.

So I live along these fault lines,
This open, aching earth,
So I can ever reach the little bloom
That grants broken dust rebirth.

There is a great compassion
Built into my design;
I am the gaping fissure,
But the flower, too, is mine.


Redemption

Gratitude that swells the soul
And pushes joy through open eyes
When all is mended, all is well,
And in the midst of great surprise
Delight settles in her little nest
And preens her precious feathers
And we awake from better into best
To the care that holds unsevered

The loves that last forever.