Category: Love

• Unforgiveness, Bitterness, Anger – These Three

  Harbored in silence,
  they reinforce the flesh
  in its fight against the Spirit—

  Compromising both offensive and defensive posture
  of their host,
  establishing a vulnerability
  vis-à-vis that ancient spiritual foe,
  enemy of the souls of God’s children,
  who delights in strife and dissension,
  aiming only to steal, kill, and destroy.

  These three are easy to harbor,
  maybe because they are invisible and unobtrusive—
  we can carry on, business as usual,
  while out of sight, these vices corrode
  our defenses against a determined foe,
  opening up potential lines of attack.

  These vices may be easy to harbor
  because we may say, with some justification,
  that others started it.
  So the adversary, latching onto this,
  assures us of the righteousness of our grievances.

  Yet faith, hope, and love—these three—
  are the antidote to these toxins,
  the virtues worthy of one bought with sinless blood.

  To these we have been called,
  and to them we must aspire.

  To walk in faith, hope, and love
  is to walk by the Spirit.

  April 7, 2024

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• Loving Brokenness

  The manifestly broken,
  came to the seemingly-whole.

  The seemingly-whole
  knew not what to do with them.

  Some, seemingly-whole,
  chastised the apparently-broken
  for bringing brokenness into whole spaces.

  Others went further:
  “Do you not see?
  Your brokenness breaks the law!”

  Some, well-intentioned, tried to help:
  “Just say a prayer, then act out wholeness.”

  And some did try,
  felt broken all the same.

  Then some—bold and otherwise-broken—
  forcefully decreed wholeness to the broken.

  Yet as some tried, and others pretended,
  their brokenness persisted.

  “Fine!” others said.
  “You can be broken—
  just don’t show it, at least not around here.”

  Then a few proudly-broken,
  along with some, seemingly-whole,
  came up with the idea:

  “Who said that you were broken?
  When ‘otherwise whole’ is all that you are.
  And who gets to decide what wholeness looks like?
  Or that there is but one way
  to manifest wholeness?”

  “Go ye instead, be otherwise-whole.”

  Others yet—thoughtful and earnest,
  loving as compassionate,
  trying but failing to help who sought wholeness—
  returned to their Master.

  “How come we, your agents, acting in your name,
  do little good in the face of such brokenness?”

  To these, the Master said:

  “To love unreservedly is salve most of all,
  for all manner of brokenness.
  To persist in earnestness, knowing it will take
  more than casual effort or simple prayers
  to resolve entrenched brokenness.”

  March 29, 2024

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• Futility

  If I can speak angelically
  or in otherworldly ways,
  but I am impatient and unkind—

  If I give away everything I own,
  yet rejoice in unwholesomeness—

  If I have mountain-moving faith,
  but I am envious and boastful—

  If I give, serve sacrificially,
  but am easily angered
  or keep a record of wrongs—

  All that I do, not rooted in love,
  is hollow noise in the end—
  a multiplication of futility.

  December 12, 2022

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• The Spirit of the Age

  It may be a truism,
  that youth inclines the youngling
  to view with condescension
  persons and precepts,
  old in fact, or just by their reckoning.

  Like youth of yore, convinced
  that their age and the knowledge it affords them
  far surpasses any before it.

  It may also be true
  that a measure of rebellion,
  an air of supreme confidence,
  is healthy in proportion—
  as common in young adults
  as its manifestation differs,
  culture to culture, case to case even.

  It may also be true, though,
  that these tendencies, otherwise sufferable
  as isolated and disconnected occurrences,
  local in geography and expression,
  are now aggregated and reinforced,
  monetized and weaponized,
  by pervasive global technology—
  into one mean and faceless mob consciousness.

  Passionate about social justice,
  they eschew any obeisance to the God of justice,
  an archaic inconvenience, in their estimation.
  Concerned about the natural environment,
  they have little regard for the God of creation.

  More daring by the day,
  to dismantle every restraint,
  remotely rooted in religion,
  and at odds with their desires—
  stranger by the day.

  With absolute confidence
  in the righteousness of their causes,
  a certainty that derives
  not from their lived experience,
  or of those who have lived longer,
  but from the algorithmic aggregation
  of faceless like minds,
  and the filtering out, by the same means,
  of all dissenting voices.

  Bristling at imperfection in others,
  they are loath to recognize any fault in their thinking,
  with little patience for those otherwise persuaded,
  playing judge of the motives of others—
  jury and executioner
  of that sentence of ‘cancellation’
  they mete out so liberally.

  August 21, 2022

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• Our Father, Their Father

  How easy it is,
  to imagine God in our image,
  who has our priorities,
  likes our friends, hates out enemies.

  Yet He,
  who spreads out the northern skies over empty space;
  suspending the earth over nothing,
  He of intergalactic wonder,
  who gives orders to the morning;
  Likely cares little,
  about our pet peeves or narrow agenda.

  Ours may be,
  to seek out instead,
  that which He is doing, in His world,
  and then find our place alongside His other children.

  Find that section of His wall, His world,
  breached by sin, that we can repair.
  Ours is to seek out the priorities of heaven,
  and to humbly make them ours.

  September 29, 2021

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