Tag: Hope

Struggle’s End

The lamb has yet to lay down with the lion
There is no peace in any day and age
Look beyond your walls! Can you not see
Enemies at the gates, barbarians rising
To receive as their bounty your life,
Your fortune, your freedom denied?

So cries one, and still another rages,
Voices of confusion and calamity.
Where will you go, with whom will you struggle
To find the security you seek within your walls
Where disease and misfortune and betrayal
Lurk at corners beyond your control?

Life in all its disarray where even within your soul
The enemy lurks to cause you to despair when hope
Seems all but lost, meaning all but gone, love
All but illusion – Where then to find the truth
That sets free? Who the author and the champion?
Who the founder and the deliverer – but God?

images

John 3:16-17
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
DailyPostPrompt: Struggle

Rebuilding with You

rain

Things can fall apart so fast
Entropy is the law of the land
But when you come and pick me up
I know I can rebuild.

Bits of life flake away
As I go through each day
Little deaths along the way
But with you, I can rebuild.

Eternal God, you never leave
Though willfully I’ve torn apart
The life that you have given me
In Christ you help me to rebuild.

Now with thankful hope I pray
And think upon that glorious day
When in heaven I’ll rejoice and say
O God, you helped me to rebuild.

DailyPostPrompt: Rebuild

 

Countless, but Counting Anyway

In Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, we are told rightly that “if [man] is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.”

True, sadly. It’s the reason we allow life to overwhelm us at times. But what if we learned to be more grateful to God, to count the countless blessings He has given us?

Our joy and peace in Him would overflow. I guarantee we would all be less stressed, more ready to give back to God from all that He has given us.

When my children were little I used to teach them a little song about counting our blessings and naming them “one by one.” I hoped to make this a habit not only to lead to a habit of living life in praise to God and trusting in Him to provide, but also to live life with joy as He intended.

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The Sacrifice

(A retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac)

Abraham and Isaac, Rembrandt (1634)
Abraham and Isaac, Rembrandt (1634)

A weary journey, a wakeful night,
They left their camp before daylight
An old man carrying the weight of years
Wrinkled cheeks wet with tears
At hearing the young boy at his side
Prattle on with childish pride
That he alone had been chosen
To help his father on this mission.

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The Pilgrim Shadow of Poe

Rather unexpectedly, the first thing that popped into my head at the DPPrompt for today – shadow – was Edgar Allan Poe’s Eldorado.

You may be one of many that had to memorize it at school or maybe you dimly recall it through shrouds of the distant past.

For the latter, I have no doubt at all that it will take just the first haunting lines will jog your memory:

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Solitude and Setting

I take my solitude as it comes
a gift that drops unexpectedly
but often when I seek it out
I seek it in the woods or sea.

There the waves lap close to shore
and crashing, murmurs of God’s approach;
then boldly run my thoughts to Him
knowing He hears me when I speak.

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The Tricky Quandary

Say, it’s tricky, quite tricky, isn’t it,
To talk to a squirrel or a rock or a tree
Or a painting by your favorite artist
And believe that somehow it can see
The heart of you that can bleed
And give you all that you desperately need?

Or maybe you talk to the farmer as he hoes
Or the doctor you pay two hundred by the hour
Or your friend who is trying on her clothes
Or the starry-eyed fan who brings you a flower
And say there’s a part of you that’s dying inside
A soul-crushing pain from which you can’t hide.

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