Archive for the ‘grace’ Category
Blood Is Not Partisan
Blood is the river we all share — given, not chosen.
How many lives would be lost without donors? A stranger’s gift flowing into another’s veins—life itself, offered unseen.
As a boy I dreamed of making a blood pact, binding myself to a friend as “blood brothers.” Only my friend was a girl. What would it mean to cut ourselves and mingle blood across that boundary? Innocence and danger mixed together in one gesture.
Now I wonder: in our divided era, could politics ever stain the gift? Might some refuse to give—or to receive—because of the donor’s convictions? Can blood even have an orientation? Or is it the last unshakable proof of what we share?
I think of the hymn about water and blood flowing from Christ’s side. Blood as salvation, blood as mystery. The chalice in worship. And the old Roman whispers that Christians were child-sacrificers, drinking blood—scandal and holiness poured into one cup.
And then the small, human side: my cousin who fainted at the sight of it. A nosebleed in school was enough to bring him down. Blood terrifies, even as it sustains.
It can save a life, it can signal the end of one, and it can bind us together in ways both strange and holy. Blood is the river we all share—flowing through strangers and kin alike, past every boundary, carrying us toward one another.
P.S. Perhaps the wonder is not that blood is so often spilled, but that it is still given.
Roundabout
A funeral procession circled the roundabout, bound for the cemetery. An impatient driver nosed in, cut between the mourners’ cars, and darted out the other side. The only one not in a hurry was the passenger in the hearse.
We pretend life gives us two choices: hurry, or not. Yet most of us choose hurry and excuse it with refrigerator wisdom: Stop and smell the roses. We don’t. We grumble at those who slow us down, and bristle at those who outpace us.
They say we live in constant change. I wonder if nothing changes—because we never pause to notice. Children leap from infancy to adulthood, and we miss the quiet growth—or quiet loss—of the spirit. We hurry to work, hurry home, hurry on.
And then, in the end, we arrive at the one appointment that never runs late.
The God who receives us is never in a hurry.
God in the Silence
There are silences that wound. The silence between two people who no longer know how to speak to one another. The silence after a loss so great that words cannot carry its weight. The silence of God, or what feels like God’s absence, when prayer becomes little more than breath.
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I have lived with such silence. I thought it safer than speech, thought it might protect others from the depth of my sorrow. But silence has its own cost. It isolates. It hardens. It makes a person a stranger even to those who love them most.
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And yet, in Romans Paul dares to say that even silence can be prayer. “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words.” Which means that what I cannot say, God still hears. What I withhold, God still knows. What weighs me down with unspeakable grief, God lifts up and carries into the very heart of heaven.
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This is a mystery. That the silence which feels like absence may, in truth, be full of God’s presence. That the groan we never utter may already be on the Spirit’s lips. That even when our mouths are closed, intimacy remains possible.
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And perhaps this is our calling as servants of Christ—
not always to speak, not always to fix,
but sometimes simply to sit in the quiet with those who cannot speak.
To believe on their behalf.
To let silence be enough.
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Because in the silence, God is already there.
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Into Your Embrace
For thirty-two years
I kept the secret of my grief.
Poems unwritten,
words withheld,
a silence so heavy
it bricked the walls of our life.
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For you,
who bore my silence
as I bore my sorrow,
you waited beside me,
through winters of hush,
through the long dark.
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Now I write—
a voice for the dead,
and a voice for you,
the living beside me.
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You said,
I would have loved them.
And whispered,
When I am gone,
will you remember me?
Your words cut me open
like a blade through cloth.
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Who will deliver me?
Who will raise me
from the fall,
the fall of my silence?
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For you,
who bore my silence
as I bore my sorrow,
let me lean,
let me lean into your embrace.
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Let me breathe out dust and ashes,
the silence I have carried like stone.
Let me breathe in the fire of your breath,
the wine of your love,
the warmth of your body beside me.
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For you,
for you,
for you—
into your embrace.
Grace in the Ruins
David Wilkerson 9/25/2025
I buried belief with her,
creeds don’t keep the night away)
Faith staggered, thin as breath-ing,
(I thought it too would fade).
But sorrow split the silence,
and beauty cut me through,
a goodness in the dark-ness
I had no right to choose.
Call it grace, call it love,
(call it nothing, call it enough)
What I lost returns as whisper—
(not a for-tress, just a song).
Call it grace, call it love,
(too frail to prove, too strong to hush)
In the ruins I belong.
Experience is brutal,
(but it will not be denied)
In the chamber of her dying
I heard life refuse to hide.
Belief came back as language,
a trembling in my chest.
To name what can’t be spoken
is the only faith that’s left.
Call it grace, call it love,
(call it nothing, call it enough)
What I lost returns as whisper—
(not a fortress, just a song).
Call it grace, call it love,
(too frail to prove, too strong to hush)
In the ruins I belong.
Oh, I thought the silence would break me,
(but it held me like a hymn).
What I buried rose to name me,
(and I let it breathe again).
Call it grace, call it love,
(call it nothing, call it enough).
In the ruins, in the ashes,
it was faith that learned to sing.
Call it grace, call it love,
(too frail to prove, too strong to hush).
And belief—belief returned—
as the song it could not bring.
“In the ruins I belong.”
On a whim... 