Hi there, I am so glad your story has intersected with mine. As characters in God’s Magnificent Eternal story, we have an essential mission to accomplish. The part you play in God’s story is different than mine, but the deep desire of our hearts, whether we let ourselves feel it or not, is one of BEARING WITNESS to God’s goodness, grace, mercy and ultimate power of redemption.
For many years, HOPE seemed like a risk. Some days it still does. It’s risky to HOPE for what I haven’t experienced. God’s goodness seems like a fairy tale we have been expected to grow out of. But it’s not. It’s truer than we have the courage to believe!
To be the witnesses God wants us to be, we have to be brave. Where you have been before this moment, what you have experienced, how God has made Himself known to you or kept Himself hidden include frightening truths. If you are like me, fear often stands between me and truth. I spent years trying to be brave on my own. It didn’t work. Not because I didn’t try, but because the isolating force of fear kept me from myself and others. I didn’t know my story, who I was in it or how to glorify God by being me.
Without committing to an epic endeavor, what if you took the first step? If you need hope to move forward in your story, if you want to enter the transformative drama of BEARING WITNESS, fear has to go. Here’s a first brave step to shrinking fear. Click here to get 5 Prayers to Feed Hope and Shrink Fear.
Sitting wide-eyed at water’s edge, surrounded with pregnant unknowns, hooked by the reflection of moonlit trees, I listened to the story written beyond their roots, shrinking first and then enlarging. First I became a bell, a moment more, a camera’s eye, and then a mouse-nosed princess endowed with second sight seeing myself as a kid, lifting mother’s mirror from the…
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What happens when the fireball in the sky lands in your dream and you have to listen to its flames? When you have to make sense of the blazing language that climbs up on your tongue and starts it wagging? I’ll tell you what happens, a light gets turned on. All those dark nights turn into summer and you begin…
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I heard it was possible, without returning to the womb, to be reborn into freedom. But I didn’t realize freedom is a journey of admitting, a journey of saying aloud what has only been whispered, an inner soaring, as if from a hot air balloon, a wafting confession sending you over Eiffel Tower walls, a swirling of hope higher than…
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Together we mined our histories with feathers. We remembered when lies blew out the light, leaving us partially blind, imprisoning all we held precious. One of us kicked in her own blood, another wandered lost in the valley of the shadows, another carried water for others while dying of thirst. Some of us witnessed demons. Others, the blood-letting of fake…
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It was beyond profound as ministerial as light on water, as a sapling, cured of all pathogens, bored through by a bloody thorn, threaded with transparent love, flung from eternity’s shores, looping, hooping, knotting together mud-clad, broken reeds of severed affections and tattered endeavors. It was me, ceasing to struggle as hope gently quilted my desires, reinforced my capacity…
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The quarrel with myself continues hour by hour – no reconciliation – little ascents and collapses, a turning back, retreating, the same ground appearing, less defined in compromised light, signs torn down or graffitied over with symbols from outsourced cans. Counterfeit gods murmur without as well as within – I toss, estranged, not choosing, in not choosing, choosing. A parade…
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In the dream that turned out to be her life, she slept by springs of living water, clothed body and soul, in the water’s skin, attended to by buttering angels carrying all she needs – protection, direction, comfort and sustenance.
She wasn’t always so fluid, she thinks. This is a desperate thought. By desperate, she means she captured it from a large crowd of vying thoughts. By fluid, she means she fears leaking out of herself. People do all the time, she thinks, remembering all the puddles. This fear is one greater than a worry about incontinence, she thinks. An…
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In the dream that turned out to be her life, she slept by springs of living water, clothed body and soul, in the water’s skin, attended to by buttering angels carrying all she needs – protection, direction, comfort and sustenance
> Beseeching God to Fulfill My Desires – “‘The messenger of the covenant whom you desire, Will come,’ says the Lord Almighty.” – Malachi 3:1 Begging God for Mercy – “For in You (Christ Jesus) the orphan finds mercy.” – Hosea 14:3 Bargaining with God for His Presence – “If Your Presence does not go with me, don’t send me…
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Displacement During the lonely night of universal disagreement, I listened to the coyotes’ wincing cries. I considered our divided histories of moons waning and moons waxing, and still, no peace between us. Lamenting our mutual suspicions, I thought to befriend and encourage, but knew better and struggled, instead, to sleep. But the ravens, crying for reconciliation, swept me up on…
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As you can see by this magnificent image, my cousin David Eckels TREAT YOURSELF is a skilled photographer. This year we’ve engaged in a serendipitous dialogue between his images and my poems. On both sides, (speaking for the both of us I hope), we’ve been surprised at the stories delivered. This image, it’s timing, breadth and evocation jolted me to…
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