a poem

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ON THE SHORE

Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.”  None of the disciples ventured to question Him, “Who are You?”  knowing that it was the Lord.  John 21:12

Galilee is in one of her moods.

The stubborn sea has refused our nets for hours, all night even,
the slight wind whispering a sharp ache into my ears,
the night air annoying my muscles into unyielding aggravation.

Fish bowels from more successful outings rot in quiet corners,
the soft staleness contrasting with the slick slime on the wooden sides.
This tiresome enterprise hurts my forearms and back.

As the sun rises, it brings with it that fusty morning-breath feeling,
a natural all-over reminder that a cycle has passed and I have ignored it.
One hundred yards away, a man watches my weakness from the shore.

He speaks: “Children, you do not have any fish, do you?”
The answer is decidedly no.
This time: Abracadabra.  “Cast the net on the right-hand side of the boat.”
And we cannot lift the net.  It is Him.

Like a moment when your own falling forward wakes you up suddenly,
my heart rate rockets.  Peter takes no time to consider wave-walking, only
jumps into the water like a lover in a hurry.

I hold the net, now wide-awake.  My heart burgeons; I feel my pulse in my arms,
my chest, my throat.  I wish my devotion was now a soaked outer garment,
but at the same time, my head has been snapped into alertness
too quickly, and I feel mute even while I yell to hold the net.

Stepping to the shore is like crossing a thick line into another land
where silence is king and stillness is queen.  Only God is over them both,
so He speaks: “Come and have breakfast.”

A charcoal fire cooks God’s catch, and we add some of ours to the fire.
My hands shake, not only with cold.  I look at the dead eyes of the fish
as they cook.  Their open eyes and open mouths make me their
breathing brother.  My mind spells peculiar out slowly:

To sit across a man who is more than a man, once dead but now
serving breakfast is too much.  All things collide:

prophecy, the Word become flesh, promises and wine, blessed are the poor in spirit, prayer and peace and psalms and palms, overturned tables and the look on His face, blessing the children, rebuking the demons, His offer of rest, all the metaphors, the stories, the quiet explanations away from the crowds, Truth for the first time, freedom, excitement, fervor, reality, wisdom, honor, purity, healing mud mixed by the King, that devastating dinner in the upper room, the washbin, the water, the way that He stooped, Gethsemane where I slept while He suffered, the crowds, the chants, Barabas unchained, the cheers, the jeers, the scorn, the blood,

the blood, the blood, the blood, the blood,

the walk, the tree, splintered wood on Calvary, the words, the orders, the dramatic curtain making a scene, the rushing terror, the torture, pain, emptiness, loss, the women, the tomb, the rock, the angels, the appearing, victory
and all
for my sake.

He offers me bread in the quiet on the shore.

Lord, forgive me! my heart pleads across the coals.
His wild eye meets mine: That was the whole point.

Humilitas

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Last fall, I had the priviledge of hearing John Dickson speak at the Global Leadership Summit.  Dickson is the author of the book Humilitas, a book about humility in leadership.  After hearing him speak, I purchased the book and read the entire thing.  It was brilliant.

Dickson, for his thesis for his Ph.D. in history, set out to find the origin of humility.  The findings were incredible.  Long ago, humility was looked down upon– but now it is a virtue society praises.  What happened to force such a change?  Dickson’s conclusion was the cross of Christ.

Before the cross, the thought was that humility was a showing of weakness.  When Jesus Christ was crucified, the early church had to look on the cross and say, “This is what humility looks like.  I need to either reconcile it with what I currently believe– that humility is weakness– or I need to change my thoughts about humility.”  And now, over 2000 years later, the world looks on humility as a lovely and beautiful thing.

The cross.  Oh how I love it, that history-altering moment in time.

 

Maundy Thursday

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hematidrosis (also called hematohidrosis) is a very rare condition in which a human being sweats blood. It may occur when a person is suffering extreme levels of stress, for example, facing his or her own death. Several historical references have been described; notably by Leonardo da Vinci: describing a soldier who sweated blood before battle, men unexpectedly given a death sentence, as well as descriptions in the Bible, that Jesus experienced hematidrosis when he was praying in the garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44).

Cutaneous hemorrhage
According to Dr. Frederick Zugibe (former Chief Medical Examiner of Rockland County, New York) it is well-known, and there have been many cases of it. The clinical term is hematohidrosis. “Around the sweat glands, there are multiple blood vessels in a net-like form. Under the pressure of great stress the vessels constrict. Then as the anxiety passes the blood vessels dilate to the point of rupture. The blood goes into the sweat glands. As the sweat glands are producing a lot of sweat, it pushes the blood to the surface – coming out as droplets of blood mixed with sweat.”

In a lecture, Dr. Zugibe stated: “The severe mental anxiety…activated the sympathetic nervous system to invoke the stress-fight or flight reaction to such a degree causing hemorrhage of the vessels supplying the sweat glands into the ducts of the sweat glands and extruding out onto the skin. While hematidrosis has been reported to occur from other rare medical entities, the presence of profound fear accounted for a significant number of reported cases including six cases in men condemned to execution, a case occurring during the London blitz, a case involving a fear of being raped, a fear of a storm while sailing, etc. The effects on the body is that of weakness and mild to moderate dehydration from the severe anxiety and both the blood and sweat loss.”

Another effect is that the skin becomes extremely tender and fragile, so that any pressure or damage to the skin is more than ordinarily painful.

my roommate Desiree

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I’ve been blessed to live with Desiree for five years this May.  She is incredible: a woman of deep faith in Christ who sincerely loves people.  As an obsessive-compulsive, I have been incredibly grateful to have a roommate like Des, who reminds me of the truth and who lifts me up in prayer.

Des is a math teacher, and it is so refreshing to see someone who is enraptured with mathematics and who intensely cares about the kids she teaches.  Des is a thinker, a student of the Word, but she can also be crazy-silly.  When, like me, you have lived with someone you adore for this long, you begin to think so similarly that you have inside jokes of which you can barely remember the origin.  I love that.

Here is how Desiree and I ended up living together.  I love telling this story.

Des was the leader of a club at the college where I recruit, and I was the advisor, so we ended up meeting from time to time to talk about “club business”– which usually meant a couple minutes on club business and then catching up the rest of the time.  After I’d known her for a couple years, my living situation was about to change, and I was intrigued when I realized that I wanted her to be my roommate.

I didn’t know what she would think of this idea.  After all, she was a college student, and I was on staff at her school.  I decided I’d sneakily broach the subject during our next coffee date.

Des walked into Caribou that night, and the first thing she said was, “I’m living with you next year.”

Yes, you read that right.

“Funny you should say that …” I said.  The rest is history.

Thank you, God.

Photo credit: Ryan Murray

Genius by Billy Collins

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This poem is strongly influencing the story I am writing right now.

Genius by Billy Collins

was what they called you in high school
if you tripped on a shoelace in the hall
and all your books went flying.

Or if you walked into an open locker door
you would be known as Einstein,
who imagined riding a streetcar into infinity.

Later, genius became someone
who could take a sliver of chalk and square pi
a hundred places out beyond the decimal point,

or someone painting on his back on a scaffold,
or a man drawing a waterwheel in a margin,
or spinning out a little night music.

But earlier this week on a wooded path,
I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir
were the true geniuses,

the ones who had figured out how to fly,
how to be both beautiful and brutal,
and how to mate for life.

Twenty-four geniuses in all,
for I numbered them as Yeats had done,
deployed upon the calm, crystalline surface–

forty-eight if we count their still reflections,
or an even fifty if you want to toss in me
and the dog running up ahead,

who were smart enough to be out
that morning–she sniffing the ground,
me with my head up in the light morning breeze.

Holy Week

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I love Easter.  I mean, I really love it.  I love Easter the way most people love Christmas.

Palm Sunday.  Gethsemane.  The cross.  Blood, blood, blood, and the sin of the world on His shoulders.

And then Easter morning comes, and HE LIVES, and EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT NOW.  Such a mighty victory– one that turned the ugliest thing (the cross) into this incredibly BEAUTIFUL picture of salvation.

Here is something I have wondered.  You know how sick you feel over the weekend when you know you have a terrible Monday ahead of you– maybe it’s a presentation, or you have to have a hard conversation with a co-worker, or you have to face your poor sales figures once again?  The anticipation is terrible, gut-wrenching, so ugly.

My question is this: how could Jesus know about the cross from all eternity and survive such a weight of knowledge?  I imagine it was almost a relief when Judas finally stepped into the garden and kissed His cheek.

I am so proud of my God.

similes to make you smile

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Best (or Worst!!) Ever Similes and Metaphors
(as taken from high school English papers)

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m., at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who also had never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

26. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

27. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

28. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

I think my favorites are the two hummingbirds who had also never met and also the 6-foot-3-inch tree.  What are your favorites?  Better yet, leave a comment with your own terrible metaphor!