Waters

I have learned to re-
learn the overflowing waters
of the friendship of Christ

that leaves my cup
almost completely empty
but carries it along

the wide waters of the flood.

We Need a God

We need a god
to mother the mothers.

such a god—
the God of Hagar and Sarai, the God of
Rebekah and Leah and Rachel, the
God of Tamar and Hannah and
Bathsheba, the God of Naomi and
Ruth and Gomer and Mary and
Eunice and Lois.

We call to
the God who cradles
exhausted mamas,
the God who nurses
us with Spirit
and lets us cry in
a safe embrace.

Overtired, grasping in the dark!, we cry out the name
of the God to whom night is as day, who never
slumbers or sleeps, who sings a song over us
and gives us rest.

Though our own mothers fail us (or even give us up),
this God picks us up, adopts us, dresses us, embraces us,
sits us next to Godself, lavishes divine riches upon us,
gives us our names.

Our God mothers the mothers.

We thank Thee, O God.

2017

Elders

I owe almost everything I am and everything
I have to the elders who invested in me.
Thank you, God, for those who came before. 
Now I'm 34 and I see many
of those gracious, elderly saints growing
frail and passing away. I mourn. They were
the ones who had walked ahead,
the ones who knew, the ones I could look to. 
Where do I look now? And how do I thank them
for giving me my eyes?

How She Is

It's hard to love an imperfect woman. 
how she's unpredictable for better and worse,
how she goes left
when every good reason goes right.
how she talks clumsy in front of your friends
and bothers the people waiting for the bus,
her dress wrinkled and nose wrinkled,
how she is never all that she could be (yet).
But oh, the evenings together!
how she opens her arms to you and lets you rest.
how she comforts you with words
you forgot that you forgot but needed.
And the days! how beautiful
she is when the light comes over her
just so and in her face you catch his face,
and she is sweeping along with a holy dance
and gathering the children up under her skirts in play
and collecting their laughter in a second alabaster box.
how she cheers with unrestrained volume
for every wet and resurrected saint,
and how she feasts!
how her heart lives enlarged with hope
and speaks a thousand languages,
how her hands are bringing bread to the hungry,
how she sets the table for the poor
and welcomes the rich to sit with us, 
here at the bottom. We feast, we sing, we sing,
we sing, we quiet down and lean back and
look around and see our bridegroom delighted with us
and we know it is hard to love an imperfect woman,
but we thank you, O God, for loving us.