Little flower, but if I could understand what you are, root and all in all, I should know what God and man is.
~ Tennyson
Am I root, or am I bud? Am I stem or am I leaf? All in all, these are not me
but signs of God’s fruiting glory.
I am but the tears He shed as He broke
into blossom.
…faith finds food in famine, and a table in the wilderness.
In the greatest danger, faith says, “I have a great God.”
When outward strength is broken, faith rests on the promises.
In the midst of sorrow, faith draws the sting out of every trouble,
and takes out the bitterness from every affliction.
~Richard Cecil
The table set for us in the wilderness may not be what we hope for nor expect. Only faith can sustain us when the cup is bitter and the meal disheartening. We may choose starvation and thirst rather than eat and drink of trouble and sacrifice.
Even Jesus asked that the cup be taken from Him. Yet He drank from it and handed it over to us.
Even as Jesus walked to Golgotha, breaking under the burden and about to be shattered, He is prepared to hand His body over to us.
He has eaten at this same table so we are no longer alone in the bitter wilderness.
And so we, sharing our hunger, our thirst, our fear, our sorrow and our pain, can say, “We have a great God.”
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
~Eugene O’Neill
We are born hollering,
already aware
of our emptiness
from the first breath,
each tiny air sac bursting
with the air of our fallen world
that is never quite enough.
The rest of our days are spent
filling up our empty spaces
whether alveoli
or stomach
or synapse hungry for knowledge,
still hollering and heart
broken.
So we are mended
through healing another,
sewn up ourselves
by knitting together
the scraggly fragments of lives,
becoming the crucial glue
boiled from gifted Grace,
all holes made holy
when filled
so wholly.
When shrieked
The bleak November winds, and smote the woods,
And the brown fields were herbless, and the shades
That met above the merry rivulets
Were spoiled, I sought, I loved them still; they seemed
Like old companions in adversity.
~William Cullen Bryant in A Winter Piece
When the winds start to howl
and leaves are flying through the air
like birds on the wing heading south,
when branches snap
and trunks bend to the point of breaking
when the ground is hopelessly barren
and the hills are nothing
but continuing shades of gray
descending from the sky
when the sun disappears for days
and the rains are continuous
I love it all still;
knowing we are in this together
when the times are tough and
the mud is thick
and obstacles fall in our way
even to the end of time
as we travel this road
like old companions
broken, withered, splintered
but sharing the journey
wherever it blows us.
Barnstorming 