Lament to the King of Homonyms

poem

Perhaps a day of failed attempts

to reconcile all the broken pieces

still unifies our need for you,

prince of peace.

Perhaps my fitful determination

to be kind

yet celebrates you,

gentle Lord who joined our kind.

Perhaps a day that dissolved

in dark tears

cries out

for you, who will mend this jagged tear.

This is not the poem

I wanted to write,

but I look for your promise

to set every wrong right.

Rewrite my poem. Set my bones.

Draw my wandering gaze. Purify my praise.

Live in these upside-down blessings we sing:

wisdom of fools, strength of the weak.

Can loud rhyming at church

will our bodies to obey through the week?

Can you make the words mean something gold

and true

in the hidden spaces of my life? Can I?

I want in fits and starts and sputtering tries

to live a life worth living in your eyes.

---

Composition Notes:

Romans 7:20-25b

“For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

I want to do good, and then I get derailed. Sound familiar? Nowhere have I experienced this duality more strongly than in my mothering. Having a sin nature is bad enough as a friend, a daughter, a sister, a wife. But as a mom? It is heartbreaking.

I wake up every day praying for the patience of a saint, and I end up instead pointing my charges to Jesus in shared prayers of repentance and cries for help. The Lord is faithful, but I am very much in the messy middle of my story. I harbor fears that my own failures will irrevocably damage our boys. I know God promises to use all things for good, but I wish our sons could learn about human frailty and God’s faithfulness some other way.

I love our boys with every cliche available to writers. They are the best of my husband and me. Meeting them was like meeting myself again: the seed of myself that had been lost in other people’s ideas of success. I looked at my firstborn’s tiny face screwed up to keep out the hospital lights, and I was undone. In an instant, he showed me what mattered. The calling of motherhood freed me from worthless pursuits and purified my longing to be fully Christ’s.

This is all so good, and fulfilling, so why does it feel like the hardest thing on repeat with no end in sight? We are facing some challenges that at times feel too heavy to bear. It’s tempting to say, “Cheer up, human parents, the Lord will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able,” but I know that sometimes “the way out” he provides doesn’t feel like victory. It might look like hungering and thirsting for something out of reach. Those who are blessed with being filled must first hunger and thirst. It might look like bringing unfulfilled longings to Christ over and over. Blessed are those who are poor in spirit. It might look like pointing family members to Jesus and hoping in heaven and not knowing how he is going to answer. Blessed, blessed, blessed because we are looking at him.

He is good. I’m certain of it. But I am not capable of holding on to my desires to reflect that goodness for more than a couple of minutes before my plans are interrupted, my desires are frustrated, and my house descends into chaos. I don’t want to leave you with a simplified assurance that Jesus will make all your dreams come true, but I do want him to be the dearest dream of our hearts, so we will look more like him tomorrow than we did yesterday. We are a family of broken people, imperfectly reflecting the great love the Father lavished on us, and yet he has called us his children. And that is what we are.

Wild Thyme by MW+ (Wild Time?)