I concluded, last night, in a flurry of penned words, that perhaps all of man's faltering come from this inherent and profound longing to know and be known. Never before has this impression seemed to stamp itself so starkly on my person. Materialism, atheism, lust, idolatry, etc., all pack with them the creature's incessant demand for significance, and perceived understanding of another. Whether we're deflecting attention or attracting it, our eyes are ever looking out to gather in, that which we think will stack, or support us whole.

I loathe how base these thoughts are, and yet, their simplicity seems to be a factor in our overlooking the sins that result from this. There is an inward tending that is vital to a man, wherein he takes his assorted expectations and disappointments, and correspondingly filters and aligns them with truth. Again, this is commonly known to man, but is adequate effort given to ensure that affecting truth is reaching the regions most often touched by the interactions that define us?

The truth about God's feelings to His children and this earth, while meant to be filtered through His word, are much more often filtered through our experiences. Each man concludes an unknowable amount of rubbish about His God corresponding to his own physical attributes, upbringing, and experiential databases, which, in turn affect all that was created to be refracted through the unique prism of his life.

I beckon to you, in an especially simple post this Valentine's Day, to align the love you've received, and the love you've given -- regardless of the quantity, and look up to the Giver for continuing to reach out in love to us. It is He that planted eternity in our hearts to know Him, and He alone that can seam up all our sorrowing souls. This is so spare a post; may the Lord add grace in your hearing.

My words are stopped up, thick, and lodged somewhere out of reach. I have been fetching for them as I walk, and when I wait, but as time flees and days end, I still cannot find them. From some time ago:

A thick band: a chord is fixed; lithe and supple, and the support of a man. Around this is enveloped a pod which opens to cloisters and crevices unseen, of unparalleled proportions and elastic capacities. Collapsed within are the by gone hopes of parted days, and withered words; unspoken, unused. Long forgetting their praise, we are as wood winds never taking a breath; strings, brittle and cracked with muted song, blunted loves and trapped beckonings, extracted only in thought.

So, for what do I play, as I tend and tarry in my inward man? I lean in to be laced, and reach out for a hook, salient and secure, where on I might latch for the support of grace to be broken and remade. For as I step out, frenetic pulses surge and multiply, and I am sprayed onto the canvas of colliding interplay, and I am seared, as a coal to my soul - my chamber is sullied. All souls experience flight, and love visiting to lift, smash, and transport up into cloud shadows and dayscapes of lifted joy onto green-drenched hands of upturned leaves, arched out from the trunks of steadfastness.

So then, all men begin their words with history; his own retelling and perceptions, however disconnected he thinks he may be. He navigates, through his own back alleys, longing to know, and thus to be known. I feel at times, that I was pulled through this life portal as at once, and abruptly. Memories before seem of wood carvings with nostalgic goodness, possessing some sort of removed remembrance, wherein the temporal took on eternal, plastic was replaced by leather, the tarnished to silver, and a full love of cherry, oak, maple and pine was spun open. I began navigating thus in an earthen vessel of carved wood, with the love of the raw bursting upon every memory as the Lenten Rose pokes up through snow. So too, the cloak of draped matter, which covers and contains all that is needed to secure and succor the bodies, and thus, the souls of men. How strange, that an orb might spin, rotate, and hang as Your earth; planets all in orbit around Your Son. Stranger still, that He is mindful of us, dust gathering dust and trying to make sense of it all --

I long for largeness of soul, to glance into grace -- to retain that which can change me, and to know the only One who truly sees me, truly knows me. I am derailed by many things, and while I see that every earthly love must sometime die, I yearn so deeply for timeless love, eternal, unbroken, untainted love, and thus I know I yearn for my eternal One. His grace is as the waters, whose upper gloss could enrich enough to quell all care, and align all regions. The glass shelf that covers two-thirds of this earth -- while able to whelm in a sweep, is shown to sustain as unsearchably deep, drawing as the tide, the heart of man back to his God.

I am not sure anything written here makes sense, but I hope that some nuggets might rise to the surface...

He Shall Direct Your Paths

He Shall Direct Your Paths

Oh heavenly posterity, sent down unto man
Promised root of Jesse; seed of Abraham
Birthed and Everlasting; Eternal Light of life
Majesty, most Holy One; the Ruler over all --

Yet still, You are a Shepherd; a Watchmen of the sheep
Lovingly You scan the earth, for our souls do you keep.


But we will grasp at anything which makes us feel at rest
Our progeny, our social class; the trinkets we amass
So one he puffs and preens his brow, and catalogues his grace
While another is bowed in perpetual loss, his life in grief, displaced


But both are lost and wandering; impenitent and blind
Untethered; loosely held, and moored in happenstance
For our lots on earth are strangely dealt; and rarely can we see,
The gilded strands, His faithfulness, wielded in Sovereignty

But oh the seed that falls in him, returning all the yield
He may walk alone; no job, no home – a vagrant on this sod
For he now knows, his appraisal is not won by craft or by might
Not in his lacking, his abundance, nor his doing of the right

For a King came down bereft of His throne, Jesus, Immanuel
He, who will roll up the heavens as a garment, the skies as a scroll,
He bore the man’s shame, and bought also, pardon
Taking the Father’s wrath, and annulling our sin

So look at This Shepherd struck down, forsaken, Great Lover of Sheep,
Who died for your pardon, and your soul, longs to keep.

Great Shepherd; Watchman of the sheep,
Protector, Provider; my soul do you keep

Fernando Ortega The Good Shepherd

Time has passed, and little thought can be given even to recall its passing. I went to the Muppets tonight, garnered a little popcorn tray, diet coke, and bag of swedish fish. I decided to dive in and enjoy a whim, and expected little. Tears began falling first at Walmart, then in passing lone travelers, and finally at the end of the film. I have so many chinks in my armor, and it's seemed over these months, that the excesses of my weaknesses have superseded the magnificence of my Maker. I've been all but utterly lost.

The psalmist states it: "Until I came into the sanctuary of my God" (Ps. 73:17a). Yes, I've been there, countless times in my ruin, and that perception -- that knowing, has been gone. He says, "I was pierced within," and so have I been. Unspeakable pangs, and wild gushes have sent me back and scrambling.

I'm detailing for a friend, the passage of each church that has lent and supported me these years, and as I've wandered back, it has pried open these portals, and propped a remembrance on which I now lean.

These pages began in a descended silence, and they've taken me again, beyond that divide present in my mind. I wrote of a family that bred draft horses, while reminded of their church moved by oxen in the Vermont winter; of a train ride through a state entirely in bloom; of entering a room of strangers playing banjos and plucking tunes; my first kiss to Montana, and the ineffable feeling of "coming home." I've gone east and west, and still I'm not there. I've felt at once that I could "stay here forever," and yet I've moved along. I look through windows of home and pass there; it is not my own.

This heart! It wants to unfold; to unravel and be upheld, and despite my especially transient nature, my patchwork creation of unattainable home is only complete because I am not yet there. I piece together the sounds, fabrics, soils and scents of what it means to me, and I seek out those who might get me there, but it is not in them; any of it. Home is in heaven, where my Savior awaits me.

But oh how I falter here! Every path beckons, and the day's, how they taunt, but in my inner sanctum, I remember what He's taught: "Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him." (Jn. 14:23). Jesus' words have been terrifying to me of late, but just now today, I find in them, great comfort. I was made for Him, and my only stay will in Him, be found.

I am thankful that I am comprised of longings, and of yearnings so intense, that I must realize that I am eternally made. No created thing will satisfy, and all the darling pleasures that rightly enrapture, and bless my soul, are only, ever, meant to direct my endlessly wayfaring heart to Him.