These summer days

How can so much living be stuffed into the days of summer? I am a suitcase bursting at the seams, a well overflowing, a garden escaping the chicken wire bounds. 

I have sat on the front porch with nineteen family members (so far), and walked the red beaches and rocked in the blue harbour. I have said my ethereal farewells to the cat that never made it home, and deloused 1.4 pounds of a fresh barn kitten. I have seen the glorious sunset spilling from the heavens over the north shore cliffs and lighting my daughter’s eyes with its secrets. We’ve danced to fiddles in the rain, and filled the house with music, and feasted on the fruits of our little land. We’ve dedicated a baby to God, and sung loudly of His faithfulness, and delighted in her perfect smiles. I have seen the fishing boats go out to meet the sun at its earliest rising and rowed under the village bridge with homemade oars. I have listened to the tales that only grandparents can tell, and embraced four generations of familial love, and received the prayer of my father’s father over my children and household. I have slept in a tent and under the thunder-drummed roof and next to a baby’s snores, and some days have woken to tired bones and headaches, but the eastern light makes shadows of the leaves on the bedroom wall and I remember to be grateful. 

This morning I hear the wind chimes singing the song of the rain to come. It’s a morning for cuddles and another cup of coffee and feeling a bit sad at the emptiness of the house. But here is still fullness of grace. Blessing upon blessing, that’s what these summer days are. 

~lg

Letters to Arden: First Born

Dear Arden,

Can we believe it's been almost six years since you were re-making me into a mother? And now you are the big girl helping to make smooth the arrival of the third born.

When Jack came along, you were not yet two years old. You practiced with a baby doll, but did not understand the change your brother brought to our lives. He was so needy, and so were you, in many ways. There were times I pushed you away, out of exhaustion, out of frustration, out of a desperate need for you to not wake the baby. And you cried on the other side of the door, and I cried looking at you shut out and wondered how I could ever make it up to you. There were times you needed me, and I wasn't there. Days and nights I had nothing left to give. And I prayed for grace to fill the gaps I could not stretch to bridge.

I wonder sometimes, did you hold it against me? Is there something in you, even now, that cries out against the voice I raised, the arms I stretched to shoo you away? I wish there had been two of me, or more of me, and I could have rocked you both to sleep.

But now, my darling, you are nearly six, and thrilled at the prospect of this new baby - though prospect and reality will soon clash, I'm sure. You sing to the little life, say "good morning baby" and "I love you baby," and you are brimming with ideas for its care and keeping.

What's more, you have been taking care of me. You see my growing tiredness, and are quick to come to my aid. You have prepared bed and couch for my rest, complete with all the little things you think I may need - books and pens and a glass of water and carefully turned down blanket. (You know me well.) Your generosity has left me humbled, delighted. Just where this kindness has come from, I do not know.

I have done my best to love and care for you, but I know I have fallen short. I know I am no shining example some days. I can only hope the light of Love, that I reflect imperfectly, is warming the places I cannot reach.

Arden - your name means eager, shining, ardent one. I have prayed your name over and over, as thanksgiving, as blessing, as petition. There have been times I have dampened your spirit and snuffed out your flame when I should have coaxed it into life. Nevertheless, six years on, you are shining bright. The flame is in your eyes and in your kindnesses and in the way you show what love is made of. And you will kindle fires wherever you go. You are already warming our family. You are already making us laugh in your light. You are already bringing something more than I alone have given. This is grace, and wonder, and joy, that love can expand beyond the kindling we offer.

You were the first to make me a mother, and in your forge I have been reshaped. You will keep shaping me even as I shape you. Oh, we will rub each other the wrong way, but let us keep close for all that. Let us keep learning love together. The sparks may fly upward, but a greater flame shall warm us.

Now, as our lives are about to shift once more, and we must make room for another, remember this - when my hands are full you are still and always welcome in my heart.


~lg

Letter to a Little One

Little one,

You are growing, pushing, expanding my borders of love. I feel it already, your feet stomping out new territory, a land about to be lived in. Already, you are staking a claim to heart and home, and we welcome your flags with joy. Already your sister and brother are circling you with their arms and knowing love to enlarge with the ever-widening space you occupy.

You are getting in under my ribs, as if under my skin wasn't enough - flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. You are step dancing on my heart, and though I have yet to know your name, I know your rhythm. I know your hiccups. My blood knows your heartbeat.

I can't deny there is some trepidation at the thought of your coming. New life has a way of turning kingdoms on their heads. But headfirst is the best way to break into the new world, and we might as well plunge headlong if we are going to fall at all. You will turn me inside out, of this I am sure, and I will be put back together a new person.

New because of you. New because of pain, and new because of joy. New because your name will be on my lips, and your smile will be in my arms, and my heart will be on my sleeve. New because of love, the wonder of its wide expanse and rough terrain and matchless beauty, a kingdom delivered through the eye of a needle and led by a little child.

You, little one, are a herald from heaven. You run with the good news, and I am a mountain waiting to kiss your toes.


~lg

Single-Handed Theology: The Piper in the Striped Pajamas

Little boy blue, come play your pipe -
Enchanting with every step
and sound from your lips.
You pull me out of bed by your tousled  head,
catch my eye with a flutter of thick lashes,
warm me to the morning in your cotton striped pajamas.

I'm a little bit in love,
and it's a good way to begin a day.
You don't even know your magic,
and it was not yours to begin with,
but the fruit of a multiplication of love.
And now the proof is in the pudding -
you are filling my earth with the blessing of old,
and I see the blush of the Tree of Life upon your cheeks.

I did not know that such a song could stir me out of myself,
out of my sleep, and into a shining new creation.
You, little seed, are crushing my darkness.
In the chestnut-gloss of your eye
I see us all as we were meant to be.



~lg

Strike-anywhere love

On cold days, remember,

Love is a strike-anywhere match. 

Even the irritation of this day is friction for the fire. When life rubs rough, bring your kindling and pray for the the crimson tip of powder to explode. Either be frost-bitten raw, or be lit, and thaw. Some days love is purely a matter of survival. Light up, or freeze out. Light up, or die.

This is the miracle: that in consummation lies salvation. You will surely splinter but love will leap into flame and spread molten life into the numbness of your winter. Love will revive.

So bring your burnt out ends. Bring your soggy offering. Bring your stone cold heart. Bring your dying embers. Bring your last bit of hope and throw yourself against the flint. You will ignite.

And maybe someone else's survival depends on you today. Maybe they've used their last desperate flare, and are simply waiting for rescue before the dark falls. Maybe your torch will light their eyes, and bring warmth to weary bones.

Maybe yours will spark the night on fire, till every signal hill burns and blazes the way to the great lighted city.

One match is all it takes. Anywhere, anywhere. Doesn't matter if it's your last. There's an eternal flame that outlasts the cold, outshines the night, and overcomes the darkness. This is strike-anywhere love. Light up, and live.



~lg

The Good Stranger

In times of fear, how do we open our hearts to the stranger among us? How do we live when the neighbourhood looks less like our own, and the back yard neighbour is not “one of us?”

It is in times like these that we must lean ever closer to perfect love, and to the greatest commandments.

“Love your neighbour as yourself.”

It’s easy when the stranger is on the other side of the world. But when the stranger begin to make an appearance, to make demands in our own world, what then? What if the stranger moves next door?

Now is the time to put the command to work, right when it seems most inconvenient, most irrational, and most impossible.

This neighbour? This “other” with the wrong accent, the wrong beliefs, the wrong God?

Yes, for Jesus Himself redefined “neighbour” in the well-worn story we call The Good Samaritan.

It’s funny. The original question is this: “Who is my neighbour?” We ask from a place of security and self-righteousness, wanting to survey all the options before committing to such an impractical endeavor. “Just who is my neighbour?” we ask with barely veiled suspicion, as if we are in the position to pick and choose.

In the end, of course, the neighbour is not one of the old stock or religious establishment. The neighbour is the Samaritan, the half-breed, the undesirable “other.” It is he who fulfills the command and becomes the shining example. It is he who loves beyond requirement, beyond the letter of the law, beyond reason. 

And the tables are turned (as they often are in the Master’s stories), and the one who asked the question is actually the one dying on the road. This is life and death. What’s at stake here is nothing less than eternal life. The real question of this story is not “Who do I have to love?” but “Who will love me back to life?”

Could it be that we are the ones most in need? Could it be that we are indeed wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked? And where does the gold come from? The white clothes? The salve? The stranger.

And how do we receive this life? “Go and do likewise.”

Let us not think we have all to give, and they have only to take. That we are in the know, and they have but to learn.

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is a dangerous place, if we are not walking with Jesus.

It is in showing mercy that we receive its full benefits. We are in need of what the stranger has to offer, and this humbling may be the narrow gate to eternal life.

For what the stranger shows us is the face of Christ Himself. We would do well to ask, “Where is Jesus in this story?”

And he answers, “For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to eat, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

Yes, the great commandments are for such a time as this, and for the least of these. For if we pass by on the other side, we may just miss Him.

How can we be sure to find Him? By recognizing that we too are in need of the healing only mercy can bring. By laying ourselves down for the bruised and broken and looking for the face of Christ in the ditches of the world.

Perfect love embraces the cast off.

Perfect love saves us from being cast away.

Yes, perfect love casts out fear.

Perfect love is the only way to live in these times, and we may just find it in the face of a stranger.

~lg

Falling in Love

No one tells you, when you choose this life of marriage and family and sticking to covenant, that you will get to fall in love again.

It happens all at once one morning, when you are drinking coffee at the breakfast table, and there is a little boy sitting there eating bread with jam and chatting about airplanes and bad guys.

It happens when she sidles up unannounced and slips her hand into yours, even though she's a big girl and doesn't need you in the same way she once did.

It happens when you catch a particular smile you've never seen before, because he's just discovered something of importance and his hair has never been that shade of sun-kissed before.

It happens when she jumps off a new height and puts a little dizzy in the pit of your stomach, but you hide it because you are so flushed with pride, and as she turns to grin she has suddenly sprung up taller.

No one tells you the unending capacity children have to make you see things new, to be plunged into love in a thousand wondrous ways. You thought that "to forsake all others" was to shut up your heart to the thrill of love, but this narrow path of two-become-one floods into acres of freedom. This life of co-creation is deep and wide, and here is all your heart's desire.


~lg

Oceans Deep: The Call to Love

The wildest call is always to love.

The most dangerous waters He calls us to walk on are these: love your neighbour as yourself, and love your enemy. 

But who among us can walk on water? Who can carry this burden? A heart can break under the weight. The fear will sink us. We have not what we need to follow this strange and narrow path.

But when there is doubt we fix our eyes on the one who has gone before us over these waves. And not only over, but into, beneath, right down to the depths of the ocean of hate and sin and death, and everything that threatens to swallow us whole. He took love to the outer limits, and seemed to succumb . . .

But perfect love cannot be overcome.

He overcame by the power of pure love, pulling our soggy mess out of the sea and breathing new life into collapsed lungs.

He breathes His love into us, and fear evaporates.
He breathes His love into us, and hatred dissipates.
He breathes His love into us, His Spirit of life, and we are filled with a buoyancy that lets us take the first steps.

The call to love is no walk in the park, no pleasure sail on the pond.

It's a walk on the wild, past the point of no return, where our only hope is to follow Him.


~lg

The heart of the universe

Another winter day and the world turns slowly toward spring, a sleeping beauty wakening to her long awaited lover. And morning by morning I wake to my own two grinning suns and the warmth that is their love.

And I can't help thinking, that at the heart of the universe, love is the most powerful reality there is.

Where does this come from?

We with the soul breath of life in our lungs, we long for it, grieve its loss, relish its nearness, suffer for its grasp, suffocate without it.
There is no substitute for love.

Where does this come from?

This world can be a confounded mess, and yet in these troubles and terrors there is one thing that breaks through the darkness, and every child knows this secret
- it is love.

Love overcomes and outlasts even death.
This, we with beating human hearts, know.
And if we know it not in experience, yet we long for it as a lost homeland.

Where does this come from?

Woven somehow into our nature,
marked somehow with a primordial kiss,
drawn by an invisible thread,
fingers tracing letters in the air. . .

God is Love.

And if it does not come from God, then from where?

Not from survival of the fittest, or the onward, merciless march of history.

But sacrifice of the fittest.
There evil stopped dead in its tracks,
where heaven and earth's history met in a blaze of glory.

Not letters in the air, or words in the sky of an abstract heaven,
but The Word
Made Flesh,
one Man
Who
Loved
Us
to
Death.

A love strong enough, pure enough, the original and best.
Outrageous, overwhelming, overcoming love.

And we saw this love and our hearts leapt within and the whole universe made sense in that instant we looked at the cross.

This is the shape of everything, right the way down.

Somehow the birds know it, in their joyful dive toward the earth,
and the river knows it, racing down and down to the freedom of the sea,
and the earth groans for what it has seen beneath the surface,
and the trees fling the late afternoon sun into patterns on the floor,
and my eyes, dazzled, might have seen a face in the play of light and shadow,
the image of the invisible burned into my mind's eye,
the shape of a man,
the shape of a cross,
the shape of love.

I blink, and the world goes on spinning,
and this reality spins inside me,
with its own gravity sending me delightfully off balance,
as only love can do.


~lg

The Armour of Marriage

Does the knight in shining armour still hold up as a model for marriage? Here are my thoughts on this over at Fun+Faith: The Armour of Marriage. 

And because none of this is possible on our own, here is Part II:

I could arm him with my love, my assurance that he is worth fighting for. I could strategize ways to protect his soul from the blows of life. I could be strength in his weakness. For better or worse, I had the honour to guard his heart as I did my own.

Become his armour.

In resolving to preserve and protect his worth, I am fighting for our relationship, rather than against it. Instead of plundering love for myself, I am putting it out there as his shield, and that ends up making us both stronger. We are in this together. We can face the battles of life, yes, even the weak points and wounds of marriage, because love is our armour, and he is arming me as I am arming him. I can lay aside my fear of being left out in the cold, because when he fails me, as I know he will, I am still covered. And when I fail him, as I know I will, he is still covered. There is a Love greater than anything we can fabricate for ourselves. It is what always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. God’s love never fails. It is our perfect armor.

And so the little knight in shining armour stands as my commitment to be his armor. He doesn’t stand alone, but in the strength of our sacred covenant and of a greater Defender. We stand together. We fight together. That little knight is a reminder to both of us that the only way to victory in marriage is through the sacrifice of love. 

~lg

Relational Homemaking

This was a post I wrote back in June 2012 over at Little Hearth & Homestead. This is where the rubber of deep theology hits the road of daily life. 

Homemaking.

I have the choice –

Is it a series of chores, or a sacred career?

Am I biding my time, or building the kingdom?

I need some kind of framework on which to hang the fingerpainting of my days.

I need a vision that puts the mundane into perspective.

I need the why behind the what.

At the end of the day, my home is a gift from God, and I am its steward. It is not an end in itself, and I am not the Master. I am a servant, and all we have belongs to the King.

My home is the environment and atmosphere in which my family grows, and so its design is crucial to the direction of our growth – toward or away from God, into or out of love.

Here the physical should mirror the spiritual. This is a place where what is most important should be most visible.

And I have decided that my goals as a homemaker are inextricably connected to my relationships. All my homemaking efforts should be directed toward four main relationships, which are also gifts from God.

It is what I call Relational Homemaking.

God

How does our home nurture my and my family’s relationship with God?

How does our home reflect the unconditional nature of God’s love?

How does the shape of our home form us into the shape of Christ?

How does our home point us to seek God’s kingdom first?

Marriage

How does our home contribute to love and unity in our marriage? 

How does our home make room for intimacy?

How does our home bring us together in mutual activities and a shared vision?

How does our home promote co-labour as co-heirs of the grace of life?

Children

How does our home encourage my children to know and follow God?

How does our home provide opportunities for loving nurture?

How does our home provide order and wonder for my children?

How does our home facilitate in the training of my children?

Hospitality

How does our home enable me to offer hospitality to others?

How does our home provide peace to others?
How does our home foster deep friendships?

How does our home point people to Christ?

~lg

Run for Covenant

What I want to say is this: In the face of the bewildering nature of human interaction, there is nothing better than to throw oneself headlong into those relationships defined by covenant. When you want to run for cover, run for covenant. When restlessness calls like the mythical merfolk out beyond the sandbars, don’t waste your time splashing in the tidepools straining to hear more. Turn and run for the hills, to the Mount Zion of your relational landscape. Run to the shelter of timber and hearth before the storm surges up and sweeps you out to sea. Run to the fortress of covenant.

The only true freedom to be had is that of obedience, and the sacred bonds of spoken vows will only chafe unless you are close enough to run together. It is not restriction – it is the place of revelation. It is not limitation – it is the face of love, whose lines can only be traced, caressed, transfigured in the constant whispering of the covenant oath.

Here is grace.

Here is truth, when the tempter’s lies buffet.

Here is trust, when trials should come.

Our original response to original sin is a patchwork cover threaded with shame. And there are days when the old bruised heel still aches along the stony way of life. But even though the path back may be laced with thorns, the healing balm is held by the hands of covenant.

It is the covering for shame.

It is the context for sanctification.

It is the geography whose contours lead to the horizon of hope and whose ridges all rise in ascent to the holy city.

What I want to say is this: Run for the covenant. For Christ Himself will always be found in the relationships He institutes. He is present in the sacramental mystery as King of the mountain. He is its heart. So run for covenant. Run for love. Run for your lives. Run to Christ.

~lg

"The Armor of Worth"

~ Excerpt from The Mystery of Marriage, by Mike Mason

"It is not intimacy itself, therefore, which is so distasteful and intimidating to the world but rather the moral condemnation that comes with it. People crave closeness with one another, but are repelled by the sin that such closeness inevitably uncovers in themselves: the selfish motives that are unmasked, the pettiness that spills out, the monstrous new image of self that emerges as it struggles so pitifully to have its own way.

Of course, only God can give people the strange desire to know the whole truth about themselves, and the strength and courage to live wide-open, exposed lives before one another. And how does He do it? How does He slip us this bitter pill, coated with intense desire and determination? Fortunately, the pill is also lavishly coated with the mystery we call love, which is the only thing in heaven or on earth which can shield us from the horror of knowing what we are really like. That, in fact, is what God's love is: it is His armor, an armor of forgiveness and acceptance that we put on over our corruption, an armor of worth or worthiness that completely covers our own worthlessness. God's love is, in a sense, the courage to go on living in the face of our sin, in the full knowledge of who and what we are. This intolerable knowledge of self must, indeed, be exchanged for knowledge of the Lord, and supremely for the knowledge of His saving power through the love of His Son Jesus Christ. That is what it means to "put on" Christ: it is to assume His strength and purity and goodness, recognizing that we have none of our own. Such an actual transfusion of character is possible only in the depths of loving intimacy with God in Christ.

And so it is in marriage that when the Lord draws a man and a woman together in the most intimate of human associations, He does so by giving them His love, which is all that can shield them through the searing experience of self-revelation they are to undergo. This is an experience that all people both crave and fear, with a fear that is conquerable only by love. Only love can drive out the constant threat of condemnation and rejection that otherwise haunts and spoils all experiences of intimacy. People cannot seem to refrain from judging one another, and in the crucible of marriage the judgment can be so intense and oppressive that the only recourse is a loving forgiveness of the other's wrongs, and in turn a courageous willingness to see one's own sinfulness exposed, conquered, and actually replaced by the other's love. In such a relationship, a true transfusion and transformation of characters may take place as each puts on the good qualities of the other and forgives the bad. Each is armor to the other, each is the other's strength and worth."

What We Did.

I wrote about how I felt about Iraq on Friday. Responsible. Today I’d like to do something unusual for me and share what we did. Not because I think we are so great, but because I want to show that we can all do something, be it ever so small. We can help. Iraq is not the only tragedy in the world. I think I really would feel paralyzed if I had to act on every nightly news clip. But we can all leave our hearts open to love, and when love speaks, whispers, shouts, bangs on our doors breaking us bit by bit, it is our responsibility to act.

“We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (1 John 3:16-17)

We prayed. I prayed for the protection of the innocent as I watched mine running and playing in the yard. There were times I wanted to shut down, to ignore the little duties and delights of the day. I sat in our house and felt guilty, not for all our meaningless stuff, but for the peace and joy we experience within these walls. This is the prize, not the American Dream, this is the gift for which we give thanks. This carefree summer day is what every child needs, and God does not begrudge us this. I sat on the green, green grass and prayed that one day those suffering would find joy. I prayed that evil would be halted in its tracks. I prayed that love would prove victorious. We keep praying that our hearts would remain open, that our hands will find fitting expressions of help.

We gave. After looking at a few different options, we gave a one time gift to an organization on the ground in Iraq providing relief to those persecuted and fleeing, no matter their religion. Was it thousands of dollars? No, not even close. But it was what we had this month. And then, we committed to monthly support for a local family we know who work in Lebanon, providing services to refugees from the Middle Eastern conflicts. Again, it is not a large amount. I wish it could be more. Maybe one day it will be. But it is our commitment not to forget after the fuss dies down.

We ate beans and bread. Pizza Friday is a bit of a tradition in our house. We make pizza and celebrate the onset of the weekend. But this Friday I couldn't. Couldn't celebrate, couldn't pile on the extra cheese. So in our own way, we fasted. I set the table, lit a candle, put a picture of the family we wanted to support next to it. Then I opened a tin of beans. Cut a few slices of bread. Sat down and explained to the kids why we weren’t having pizza tonight. We talked, on a four year old level, about people who were sad and needed to be safe, and that we were going to try and help. “Maybe those people could come to our island and live in safe houses here,” my daughter suggested. Oh, the simplicity of childlike faith.

On Sunday in our church one of these children of faith showed a picture he had painted. Two people walking toward a big red sunset. He is painting pictures to raise money for his grandmother in Kenya, who feeds dozens of hungry children in her own home, daily. He sells the paintings here in the community and sends the money to her. His idea. He’s just a kid.

“Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.” (1 John 3:18)

Perilous times call for particular acts of love. Change happens hand to hand, bean by bean. We can choose to love. We can choose to walk away from darkness, toward the sun.

~lg

Responsible

Something is horribly wrong. One of my children watches early morning kids tv while the other sleeps quiet upstairs.

Meanwhile, there are children starving on mountaintops and children being beheaded in a park. I put the kettle on for coffee, survey the happy mess of yesterday’s play. I put toast in the toaster and the birds whistle outside the window. How would I feel if it were my daughter, my son? It is. They are distant, but they are part of my own body.

I feel responsible. Not for the crimes, but for my brothers and sisters, and all the children distorted by suffering. I do not feel able, not in the least. What is my response?

Coffee’s ready and the sun stretches out lazily through our little valley, the same sun that burns angry over the brazen evil in another land. This evil, this is not new. Braver and better people face it every day, challenge it every day, in thousands of ways all over the world. But sometimes a heart can get whiplash, and mine is here aching for Mosul and Mount Sinjar.

I feel helpless. I have a few extra dollars, a few extra prayers. We try not to think too much on these things, lest our lives be soiled by their awful truths. But I cannot look away. I must not forget, when my children are screaming in laughter, that others are not. I don’t have answers, and only a small voice, but I will denounce this vomit of hell. I have a heart, and today I will let it be stained with the sorrows before me.

My children are safe. My toast is cold. My heart is broken. Perhaps, together somehow, our love can make a way even into this hate and horror?

*Part II - What We Did. 

~lg

The kiss of God

"You've come and burned me with a kiss."

What is the kiss of God if not a burning coal from his mouth? A live coal from the altar, the temple of His body. As love begins with a kiss, our union with God begins with this encounter. A being of unclean lips trembles before the Consuming Fire, and if we draw near, dare to do so, in desperate desire to touch Him or die, touch Him and die if necessary, then He does not spit us out of of His mouth but draws near with this burning kiss. It's a kiss of death to sin and its icy hold, to all the lies we've ever told, the kiss that purifies, unlocks our lips to sing "Holy, holy, holy" and ignites the soul blaze of true love. There can be no intimacy without it, for this is what brands us as His own.

"And my heart burns for You. . . "


*Psalm 18:8, Isaiah 6:1-7
lyrics ~ "Obsession" by Delirious 

~lg

Still.

Be still, oh beating heart.

I sidle close after this swirling mess of a day with its tears and tantrums and timeouts. Night has fallen, and with it a veil that softens the rough edges of glaring hours. I find your little body, a slight form under the blankets, and pull tight, hoping to grasp your heart somehow in all these layers. I’m pulling and praying and begging God to make this connection when I’ve gone and frayed all the edges. I fear the hypocrisy of my feeble words, so I put my hope into these breaths that rise and fall with yours, calming, slowing, till I feel this space between us tauten and still.

Still.

My soul, the Lord is on our side and he speaks peace to hurricanes, yes, even ours. One green eye peeks out from under the blanket hideaway, then a hand finds my face, and, oh, a multitude of sins are covered. Let the world somersault around us, I have found the one my soul loves, and we are anchored still.


~lg

sonnet imperfect

How do I love Thee?

And what stands in pure love's way?

The only way I know is to love these ones You have given me. But they are imperfect and I find my love faltering. Strange that to draw near to the Perfect means to embrace imperfection.

Why do You clothe Yourself in these rags? Is there no other way to the city of God than the road of suffering? If I hope to find You in the city, I must look for You on the road, the man beaten and bloodied by guttersnipe robbers, the man ignored by those of religious persuasion, the man dying.

I am but a Samaritan, and nothing like good, but in this stoop to gather Your wounds in my arms, I hope that some of Your blood may rub off on me.

Love is a laying down.

I could count the ways this all inconveniences me, but better to throw my hands up to Infinity.

"Lay down with me," the Perfect says, "and I will show you what Love is."

Love calls in the crying child, the mess of play on the floor, the ever-bending of my will to the Will of God. He wills Love, only ever Love, and He wills it in a thousand ways, wills that these stumbling stones become a bridge that takes me to the rock solid.

A pure and perfect love - the telos of life hidden in the chaos of living. The face of God in the face of a child.

Only here, with my childhood's faith, I love Thee purely.


~lg

Kingdom Field Notes - February 14

The sweetest water sings the song of descent. When the river tries to hold it in, hold it back, it floods with muddy silt, the stench of stagnancy. The music drowns.

Living water is giving water. Love is a downward motion, its beauty in the emptying. It only sings downstream.

~lg 

Remembrance Day 2013

Today, the prayers are punctured with cannon shot.

Today, the river runs red with mud, swollen with the memories of lives swept away.

Today, children stand in the rain and ask what all the pretty poppies are for.

And I pause and look at the guns and wonder how to explain all this to the innocent.

I pull back the curtain on human hurt, just a bit, just enough, I hope, to reveal something of sadness and thankfulness. What it all comes down to – not enough love in our hearts. We humans, we can die for lack of love.

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee.

This is the only way to peace. This is the only thing stronger than death. This is the only thing that can overcome “all this.”

Today, let every heart bloom red with love, lest all these pretty poppies be in vain.

~lg