You have parted the seas of pain in my life
Been my fortress in the fires of my suffering
Walked with me
Over the waters of my fear
And through every storm
You have been my covering.
How much more can you do
In these Covid times we are in,
As events continue to unfold.
We have seen it before
And we will see it again
Your goodness, Your victory, retold!
It is so easy, in this current climate, to feel discouraged and full of anxiety as our world has been flipped upside down. My hope is that this poem helps to settle the sorrows and calm the fears through this reminder of who God is. For me, when I fix my eyes on Jesus; on what He has done in my life and throughout history, I am filled with tremendous peace. This peace comes from a place of confidence and trust in who God is. God is abounding in love and faithfulness (psalm 86:15), God is our ever-present help in trouble (Psalm 46:1-3), He is our refuge (Deuteronomy 33:27), victorious (1 Corinthians 15:57) and we are more than conquerors through Christ who loves us (Roman 8:37).
There will be times you are at your lowest points
When anguish engulfs you and there is nowhere left to run
And the words of our loved ones fall flat, hallow
No one can meet you in this darkness
And the support will seem lack lustre
Will seem disingenuous
Will be flawed
And you retreat within, in solitude
Praying away this poison chalice
This cup of suffering
In a manic display
Until your legs give way and succumb
To the gravity of surrender
And then
Beyond the unrest
Beyond the disquiet of your anxiety
The starring of the still small voice
Overtakes you to reveal
“Beyond this pain
Beyond this bitter suffering
And far beyond what your mind can perceive
Lays a promise, a hope,
A purpose for all that be
Rooted in my immeasurable love
And, oh, how I love you,
Cherished one
One day you will see
The glory and the splendour
Of an eternity with me.”
And as these words leave me
Some things do stay
Like the peace that passeth understanding
To guide me on my way.
I was in my room reading Matthew 26:36-46 and I was struck by the sheer humanness of Jesus. The lines –
38 “and he said to them, ‘The sorrow in my heart is so great that it almost crushes me. Stay here and keep watch with me.’
– hit me first and birthed the opening lines of my poem Gethsemane. We have all experienced extremely low and painful moments in our lives, what this passage reveals to us is that Jesus has been there too. In my weakest and most heartbroken, when the sorrow in my heart was so great it almost crushed me – God has felt this too. I am floored that this is a Love and this is a God who intimately knows my suffering and that through suffering I can grow deeper in my relationship with Christ.
The lines –
40 “Then he returned to the three disciples and found them asleep; and he said to Peter, ‘How is it that you three were not able to keep watch with me for even one hour?'”
– hit me next and I felt the disappointment Jesus must have felt in that moment when he found his disciples asleep. The experience of being disappointed by your friends and loved ones is profoundly universal and I wanted to capture that my poem as much as I could. People let us down and the weight of that disappointment can be enormously heavy but I have found, in my own experiences of disappointment, that God can meet us there and help us carry that weight (and even take it away).
For if my body was a temple
It would be a shelter for the homeless
A second chance for sinners
A gateway to God
Through the love that radiates in us all
There would be no pretence here
No “holier than thou”
No role playing
No mask wearing
Just a group of God-fearing sinners
Trying to make their way Home.
There would be no saints,
For I am not one
For the good that I desire
I do not do,
But the evil that I do not want
This I practise
And it is in this temple
That only this kind of biblical vulnerability will reside.
Where there is no shame
For the reality of our human experience.
For all the ways we sin and fall short
Of God’s glory
Time and time again.
My temple would be
An abundance of loving arms
Mirroring that of the father of the prodigal son
Welcoming all home
Like estranged family
Ready to start anew
Oh, how eagerly God welcomes us home
Oh, how he yearns for us
How he pines and bleeds for us
But alas, my body is not a temple
This temporal cage does not deserve such recognition
My body is more like a prison of flesh
That my soul battles in
Constantly battling against my own human nature
Drifting me further and further away from the divine
May the Lord help marry my nature to my nurture
Help to bring peace to these two duelling entities
My innate sinful inclination
Versus
My holy burning aspiration
Only in you, Lord, will I find
Harmony and wholeness in this fatal human condition
For this I know:
Your Grace is sufficient,
Your Love is enough.
When seeking solace, I sit in solitude
Sufficed alone by the timeless, the biblical, the true
Surrendered, wholly , I follow the call of a heart pursued;
For this Love, it leaps through the lines,
Your presence, it penetrates my pain,
Your call, it brought me to these rhymes;
And, overwhelmed, undeserving, of this Love so true.
By your Grace alone do I live through;
With these tears, baptismal, I awe at this great gift of You.
Welcome to Ruth's Rhapsody 