My body is growing new skin right now
right there, on my hand. I can point to it.
I can watch it grow. We could time lapse it.
I can very clearly tell that tomorrow
things will look better on that cut
than they do today, or did yesterday.
I didn’t tell my body to do this.
It just does it.

I’m getting caught up on life:
tour dates, blog posts, poems,
finishing books, starting jobs
paying bills, tidying loose ends.
Straightening out the knot that I was
and the bumps on my hands start to fade.
I didn’t tell my body to do this.
It just does it.

And someday soon I won’t itch, in my mind
or on my hands. But for now
I watch the skin grow, and the bumps fade
and I praise that I can reset,
for that God knew I needed a rest,
not just from school, but from myself
and worry, and bad faith
and all those things I do when I can’t believe
that I don’t need to tell my body
(or my God)
to do things.

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.