For a while now I've been realizing that there's too little poetry in my life. Too many details, not enough poetry.

Poetry is what strums the chords in my soul.

It's the summer storm moving with the suddenness of an exclamation point across the lake

and the double rainbow that ended near our boat at the Hylton's dock.

It's the grace in a friend's sly smile when he knows I'm not at my best.

It's the life-giving actions of busy people who put their own lives on hold to bring heaven closer when you're in pain.

Tonight the missionaries we're going to visit in Cambodia answered Karen's question "what do you miss that I can bring?" 

-Hot lemon Chitos

-Whopper malt balls

-Hot chocolate packs

-Sour patch kids candy

I think it will taste like poetry to them.

This evening I was listening to Josh Garrels, realizing again how I need poetry in my life, and this lyric from his song Decision struck me:

Everyone says that it's alright

Living in darkness every night

But I think it's time to find out

And make that change

As poetry goes, the lyrics are OK, but put them to music and sing them from your heart, and it can touch you.

What does poetry do? It moves us to a place where our spirits can breathe. We suffocate down here

in these cubicles,

in this traffic,

in these transaction-oriented relationships,

in front of these TVs.

                 It all constricts the spirit...

Suicide is a desperate thing, but not for those who already feel dead inside. When Josh Garrels sings of that bleak and lonely place where some people find themselves, I think its an act of a poet. I think it mirrors God's poetic impulse in creation.

I hear his song as a life raft in the fog and I hear God in the back beat joining Garrels in his project of creating the possibility of hope. Maybe just enough hope to make it through to a place where storms end and rainbows unexpectedly show up.

Farther along we'll understand why

Cheer up my brothers, live in the sunshine

We'll understand this, all by and by

Tempted and tried, I wondered why

The good man died, the bad man thrives

And Jesus cries because he loves em' both

We're all cast-aways in need of ropes

Hangin' on by the last threads of our hope