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.
Tell Me About It
O God Almighty—
You must see this endlessly:
our jagged apologies,
our letters unsent,
our bruised words
and unnamed wounds.
How do You hold it?
All these lives
turning like loose pages in Your wind.
I am only one of them,
stumbling through shame and bewilderment.
Tell me about it, Lord.
Tell me how You bear it
without breaking.
And as You tell me,
teach me how to let go
what I cannot mend.
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.
.
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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Do Your Duty
Every citizen has a duty to perform. Some of us choose to fulfill that through military service. When someone learns I am a veteran, they often say, “Thank you for your service.”
I should probably reply, “It was an honor.” But I don’t. I pause.
Because truthfully, I feel a mix of embarrassment and frustration—embarrassment that I don’t quite know how to receive the thanks, and frustration that such words sometimes seem to serve as a kind of inoculation, as if my service relieves others of the duty we all share.
What I wish I could say is this: “Don’t thank me as though my service absolves you. Do your duty too.”
Even better, I would love to hear someone say:
“Meeting a veteran reminds me that I also have a duty to my country, my community, my neighbors. Here’s one way I’ve been living that duty… Thank you for reminding me.”
Because service, after all, was never meant to be mine alone. It belongs to us all.
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.
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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.
On a whim... 