Categories
love Poetry

Our lifelong fight

Our lifelong fight as a Christian is to get off the natural level and on the supernatural. Our lives must be a pure act of love, repeated many times over.

Day, Dorothy. The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus (Plough Spiritual Guides: Backpack Classics) (p. 58). Plough Publishing House. Kindle Edition.

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Before we dismiss,
yes, dismiss,
Dorothy Day altogether,
along with Mother Teresa,
and Francis of Assisi,
and the Father
and the Son
and the Holy Spirit
for being unrealistic,
idealistic,
hearts-on-sleeves-heads-in-clouds,
big talkers
of inconvenient truths that,
if we don’t immediately,
knee-jerkedly,
dismiss,
we might feel just a tidge
of something we don’t like
about ourselves,
something like guilt, maybe,
for how cold
and self-serving
and small
we really are;

before we do that,
could we allow that tidge
of living feeling
bring to life
within our cold, small selves,
something, maybe, like
awareness
and acceptance
of who we are
and what our lives are like
apart from the love,
the kind of love,
these talkers talk about?

dw

Copyright © 2020, becomingflame.com

Categories
Music Poetry

Music this week

The post for this week is on my other site, dwpianomusic.com

I’m glad to have published another piano piece there…it’s been waiting for over a year. Please give it a listen – I hope you like it.

Grace and peace to you…

dw

Categories
love Poetry

What he said…

Jesus didn’t say: Figure me out;
He said – Follow me.

He didn’t say: Get your doctrine right;
He said – Judge not.

He didn’t say: Puzzle out the End Times;
He said – Stay awake.

He didn’t say: Perfect yourselves;
He said – Love me with all your heart.

He didn’t say: Develop your vision for ministry;
He said – Love your neighbor.

He said:
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
the meek,
those who mourn,
who seek peace,
who hunger and thirst for the world to be right with God,
who are judged and ridiculed for doing so.

He said those things – that’s what He said.

dw

Copyright © 2020, becomingflame.com

Categories
Bible reading love Poetry Scripture

I had lost something

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi (AmazonClassics Edition) (p. 74). Kindle Edition.

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My hunger for knowledge about God,
my obsession with doing what was right,
what would leave me blameless
before any accuser,
even God himself
(myself another Job),
all but devoured my chance,
my only chance,
to experience ‘the grace,
the beauty, the poetry’
of the Majestic River
of Life.

I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.
Revelation 2:3-4

Harper Bibles. NRSV Bible with the Apocrypha (Kindle Locations 88055-88057). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Grace and peace to you…
dw

Copyright © 2020, becomingflame.com

 

Categories
Poetry the real self

This cup

Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?
This cup, just for me, appointed for me.
Chosen for me.

I could say No, not this cup.
Father, give me another;
I don’t want the one you chose for me.

I could say No cups for me,
thank you very much.
But one day I would wake up:
There, at my lips, sour, bitter,
would be the cup of my own making.

Every moment is another cup,
A cup I will drink to get to the following moment.

Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?
This cup, just for me, appointed for me?
Chosen for me?

dw

Copyright © 2020, becomingflame.com