Archive for the ‘hope’ Category
The Middle of Hope
This morning’s worship service caught me off guard.
The reading was Micah, chapter 4—the vision of swords beaten into plowshares, nations unlearning war, people sitting unafraid beneath their own vine and fig tree.
It is a beautiful passage.
Almost too beautiful to trust.
Which may be why it has endured.
As the words were read aloud, an image returned to me—not as memory, but as presence.
It was an image Beth kept close.
A poster she chose.
A prayer she lived with.
At its center: a battlefield grave marker.
A helmet resting on the butt of an inverted carbine, the rifle stabbed into the earth.
Dog tags hanging quietly from the stock.
The sign of a soldier buried where he fell.
Nearby, the words:
Blessed are the peacemakers.
I first saw it in 1972.
I was young, unsettled, and already committed to enter the service of the United States Navy. The war was unpopular. The country was divided. And I was trying to make sense of my own decision to serve.
There were nights when I wondered whether duty and peace could inhabit the same body.
When I first saw the image, I took it as affirmation.
My service was sacrifice.
My sacrifice was a pursuit of peace.
I did not think that belief was naïve.
I still don’t think it was simple.
Years later I realized, Beth chose that image—not as endorsement, but as prayer.
She did not display it to resolve the tension.
She displayed it to live inside it.
This morning, Micah 4 reopened what I once thought settled.
Micah does not offer reassurance.
Micah offers an end that has not yet arrived.
Before plowshares, there is judgment.
Before fig trees, there is disarmament.
Peace, in Micah, is not imagined.
It is adjudicated.
Violence is not denied.
It is named—and then relinquished.
Suddenly, the image Beth loved no longer functioned as approval.
It stood as witness.
The rifle in the ground has not been transformed.
It has only been stopped.
Silence is not the same thing as peace.
Sometimes it is only what remains when the carrier is gone.
The weapon is quiet not because the world has learned peace, but because someone paid the cost before it did.
That realization did not undo Beth’s prayer.
It completed my hearing of it.
Blessed are the peacemakers names the way.
Micah 4 names the end.
The grave marker names the cost in between.
Hope has a middle.
And the middle has graves.
Standing there in worship, grief did not isolate me.
It did not collapse into memory.
It opened into communion—mediated, costly, and real.
Not nostalgia.
Not recollection.
Communion through what she loved.
Communion in the way of seeing she inhabited.
The call that came with it was not loud.
Live this way.
Do not turn aside.
Do not lie about the cost.
But I left accompanied.
Where All Waters Join
Sometimes grief does not cry out—it drifts, carried by the same current that once bore our joy.
There are moments when loss comes not as thunder but as reflection—when the world stands still, and what we see is not the end but a continuation, changed in form.
I wrote this after a dream of a river and a face that was both Ophelia’s and hers—the one I loved more than life itself.
It is not about death, not really. It’s about arrival: the mystery of the one who was, the one who is, and the one who has yet to come.
I offer it here in gratitude and quiet wonder, a meditation on how love endures beyond the reach of hands.
⸻
I see Ophelia floating, dreamlike,
on the current of a cold river.
The water moves with a whispering insistence,
brushing against stones polished by centuries of sorrow.
Her body is already still,
her face molded by the mercy of the chill
into a child’s perpetual smile.
Then the surface wavers,
and I recognize the curve of her mouth—
not Shakespeare’s daughter of grief,
but the woman I loved more than life itself.
The recognition is the wound.
Not that she is gone,
but that I can no longer feel the warmth
that once made her real.
The ache lives in my hands,
in what they remember
and the water refuses to return.
Yet even as I kneel on the bank,
a strange peace rises.
The river does not end;
it only carries her beyond my reach.
In its mirrored flow I see three arrivals:
the one who was — radiant and laughing in sunlight;
the one who is — still, luminous, beyond decay;
and the one who is yet to come —
the presence that will meet me when my own current slows.
I do not call it faith,
only recognition —
that love does not vanish;
it merely changes address.
The current carries her onward,
and somewhere downstream,
in water not yet visible,
I believe she waits —
not to return,
but to receive.
⸻
And so I let the river keep her, trusting that love, like water, knows its way home.
A lyrical reflection on loss and arrival. Through the image of a woman floating on a twilight river, “Where All Waters Join” explores how love endures beyond separation, and how grief, carried by the current, can become peace.
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.
.
For you,
who bore my silence
as I bore my sorrow,
you waited beside me,
through winters of hush,
through the long dark.
.
Now I write—
a voice for the dead,
and a voice for you,
the living beside me.
.
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.
.
Who will deliver me?
Who will raise me
from the fall,
the fall of my silence?
.
For you,
who bore my silence
as I bore my sorrow,
let me lean,
let me lean into your embrace.
.
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.
.
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.”
Light Falls Across the Years
Light falls across the years; a ribbon that ties together mornings separated by decades.
Here in my kitchen on a quiet Sunday, the coffee not yet poured, I have left the lights off. From the east, the sun filters through late-summer oak leaves and finds its way inside. The beam slants low and sure, almost carrying texture in the air, as though light itself could be brushed with the hand.
And in an instant, I am a child again. I see the narrow blinds of my boyhood window, the sunlight carving bright stripes across the floor, shadow and brilliance arranged like notes of a song I did not yet know how to sing.
What surprises me now is not the memory itself, but its persistence. Across the long arc of living, my gaze has remained tuned to these small alterations of light and dark, to the way illumination lays itself down like a blessing on ordinary spaces. It is as if such moments have bracketed my days—beginning in wonder, and now, in later years, circling back to wonder again.
On a whim... 