You didn’t strip the building to its beams.
You stripped the beams from the building
while the outside stood: the same haircut,
beard, mole, eyes, general weight and height.
The building doesn’t sway as much, but I
find myself missing that romanticized sadness:
nostalgia, knowing that it won’t ever come back.
Or, at least, that it shouldn’t come back,
and I don’t want it back.
I don’t want to be who I was in the place I am now;
I want to be who I am now in the place I was then.
Things would have been different, you know?
And I don’t know why I had to be like I was
for things to turn out this way, but I did.
Not just for my sake, but for others’ too-
paths that divulged from mine
would not have taken such crazy angles
if the impetus were not so strong to leave.
I can only apologize so much for who I was;
at some point it needs to go like Calipari’s UMass.
It happened, but it’s not officially recognized.
Real, but also not consequential. Unlisted. Asterisked.
And that romantic sadness is, instead, a starting point
for joy; new ground to break after turning over the old soil.
In seven years, the ground isn’t the same at all;
in seven years, the body is composed of entirely new cells.
And in seven years, I will be somewhere, doing something,
completely new, remembering the day I wrote this,
looking back and wondering why I had to be who I was
so I could become who I am; the inescapable now
crashing into the inconsequential* past
looking toward the inscrutable future,
inside the same unshaken building.

Everything inside my body wants out
And as it breaks the skin, I itch.
I desperately want to feel smoothness
but there is no way to it
but through unpleasantness.

I fear the words I use for this.
I fear that someday they will be read
and they will haunt me, hanging over my head
causing controversy, causing offense
and I will be cornered.
I fear this tremendously.
It is bad, bad faith.
I am afraid to even publish this.
It is bad faith.
Jesus Christ is Lord,
there is nothing in life that matters but this.
I have already said this so many times
in so many ways
on this blog.
and yet I am afraid anew
not because of any change in God
but a change in this man,
having seen a tiny speck of what is to come
and where I am to go.
And instead of entrusting that to him,
and resting in all that He is,
I retreat, retract, try to protect that vision
Nevermind that I would abandon my means
to protect my ends; neither are mine,
and neither can be abandoned.

I am afraid of the place where I stand:
on the edge of making waves,
a second away from making noise,
a choice known but unspoken.
Further alienating myself ideologically,
further pressing in to Christ.
Who do I really care about?
How do I best show this?
What really matters?

And how do I get past the shame that I’m not doing enough,
the fear that everything will be ruined by my doing,
and the itch that won’t go away to do what I ought?
Only Christ can conquer.

Since I have spent most of my life cheering for the underdog, it is not often that my team wins. It is even more rare that my team consistently wins. But seeing my team win a big game is most rare of all. (Even when I had an interlude in my underdog appreciation and rooted vociferously for the University of Oklahoma football team, we still didn’t win the big games.)

It’s such a rare phenomenon for me that when Kevin Durant hit the game-winner tonight, I danced around my living room a bit, dashed off an all-caps Facebook status, and didn’t know what to do next. I mean, what do you do when you finally get the thing you’re looking for? How do you live in light of what you’ve accomplished? Do we just go on to the next thing? Rub the trophy every time we leave the locker room for the next season? Bragging rights?

I’ve pondered this question a great deal; if I had an answer, I would have finished my second novel by now. It’s not enough to write poems, essays and songs about this idea for me; my next novel (should it ever be finished) deals directly with this topic. And I’ve been stuck for a while, because I don’t know what it’s like to get that which I long for. I’m starting to think that the longing may be the nature of life on this side of the eternal line. No wonder asceticism and meditation are popular; when faced with a chronic hole, the space filled with something or shrunk. Asceticism is shrinking it. Christianity is filling it with the joie de vivre that comes from a life lived by the Holy Spirit (regardless, it should be noted, of circumstances; although I fail in this all the time).

And I do let a lot of things get between me and the crop of the fruits of the spirit. Sometimes it’s the desire itself, grown out of proportion, that blocks me from filling the hole. When the hole is too vast for anything to fill it, everything feels underwhelming. Everything, that is, but Christ. The love of Christ is infinite, and can fill any hole that is cleared for him to fill with his love. And we have a Father who clears those spaces in us.

And that is how I live in light of the completion: that which was necessary for me was done by Christ. All that follows is a rejoicing in that truth, and an outworking of that truth. I must constantly look back at the event and rejoice. It is not always what I want, but it is always what I need.

Always one step ahead of the undertaker
a few minutes before every the deadline
ever skirting out from under the axe
a life permanently teetering on the edge

running along it, wavering this way and that
one side toward land, the other abyss
the sort of fun that is dangerous
the sort of danger that is fun
until a few more degrees on the abyss side
my inner ear to feels the loss of balance

and I am freefalling
for mere seconds
(figuratively,
contextually,
in terms of lifespan)
before He catches me,
rights me,
like a young boy
learning to ride a bike
who never scrapes his knees
because of the close father-watching

I will never forget how to ride
but somehow I always forget
how to trust

No matter how much
burning and dodging
I do to this picture,
the details won’t come out.
The content wasn’t ever there.
All these repeated attempts
and ruined materials
and extra flashes of the bulb
accomplish nothing but proof:
we can’t contemplate true nothing
but whatever’s one step above that
is in this heartless endeavor.

No praying will change it.
(Or will it?)
No human effort can fix it.
(Or can it?)

We live in a tension:
what we are responsible for
(we must move)
and what is in the hands of God
(we must trust)

I wrestle the moments.
Must I stick my neck out?
Have I pushed too hard?
When will the Lord weave?
Will he craft through my hand?
Always, to every question.
And that is the tension,
my lonely heart burning,
dodging the answers:
when should I act,
when should I trust—

no. It’s this:
how do I do both at once?

There are families beyond families.
And to be lost in the greater folds
of the wild universe, total eclipse
a shining circle around the black
spot of tea, we are reconciling all
that has been with what was promised.
And then to be found alone, standing
with my face in the wind, too stoic
then for someone to come along side me
taming the raging cosmos of my mind
brightening the way, adding your light
to warm the tea, and build a bridge.
this is what was promised to us:
there are families beyond families.

All now scattered pieces
All the knots in the line
How to form them into a whole?
How to straighten the string?

Always ask the pretty girl to dance
Write a to-do list (for tomorrow)
Do the laundry and the dishes
Vacuum, sweep and dust
Wash behind your ears
Love your lover
befriend your friends
Pray before sleeping,
Then don’t set an alarm
Seek peace with men and women
Make peace with God
and talk with him daily

but when the dishes pile up
and the lover is not easily loved,
when all that goes wrong,
Make peace with God
and talk with him daily.

I have learned that things attack us in our sleep
and in our weakness
and that our weakness is much like sleep
in that we do not know we are being attacked.

But the half-awake state,
between the fantastic and the real
is where we rest and stay safe;
the understanding that there is more than this
and every choice can head toward it.

Every day a little more waking,
every day more darkness sheds,
and the unfamiliar blur
starts to turn into shapes.
Someday to wake entirely,
A fade in, a stepping over the gap,
rubbing the last bits of sleep from our eyes,
not awakened in terror, but shaking the covers off
a black blanket, a white jacket.
Always moving.
Yesterday I drifted toward sleep.
Today I move to wake.

Let me be always lunging for light, for
I have learned that things attack us
in our sleep.

“I could have a very full life
if I never married,” he said.
And if I were talking with
an older version of myself
I hope I could say the same
(without having to do so.)
For I am not convinced as he
that life has other centers;
but there would I betray myself:
“Our Father, who art in heaven.”

Many of my Christian actions were legalistic ploys. If I did this thing right, and didn’t do that thing wrong, God would be in my favor. And that’s not how grace works, as I am starting to see. However, I don’t know how to live in grace: where do I go with no guilt complex? How now do I choose not to sin? I need the love of Christ in and through me all the more, now that I am grasping grace: I am the man who makes the argument to sin on more so that grace may increase. Perhaps not as directly as Rasputin, but indirectly, I am just as much a transgressor.

Grace will always guide us on toward Christ all the more. Oh, to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be.