Ideas

- What we, in the modern age, are looking for are people and methods we can imitate. That we can be just like. But in the Bible, all we see are humans who tell a story, who show us the way, not models to imitate and procedures to replicate.

- The way that dad running across the stage reminded me that the disciples were real people

- Something about the word into, God's way into the world was Jesus, our way into God is Jesus

My Hezekiah

The living, the living,
humble life demands little notice.
Demands influence existence,
but in the instants between
abuse and abusing, we are given
a chance to regain our breathing.
Yet you are taking my chance away.
You are taking my breath away.

And what can I say?
Lord, come to my aid?
From unchanging to unchanging,
You spoke, and so as I know
You, rigid and but honest:
Where is my hope?

While I walk humbly, with voice
like a thrush and otherwise hushed.
With gentle hand my living soul
is brushed like breathless,
heartless, formless dust
behind your back, oh the grounded lack
spirit to fill their lungs
and exhale Your name aloud.

With eyes that roam the fields
and hands that harvest earth,
do You ever pause, do You reflect,
do You consider the swept up speck
that longs for life, to sing alive,
that has wept and wept and wept?

Now what is the melody coming down
as the sun backs up the ten steps,
to dry the tears where I sat and wept.
Restoration, light through the vines
round the almond tree, light for me.

And so have You, have You changed?
Or have You heard a mourning dove
moving toward its final evening,
and have You wept?

Patient, til dawn, You have taken a broken song
and put it to strings,
new life to its wings, and made it rise.
The perfect renewal of a rhythmic chorus,
taken up by the first tree and still
sung by steaming fig leaves,
the perfect crescendo, the reason to hope.

Yes, the Word of the Lord stands forever,
but it bends to bring voice.
For the grave cannot praise you,
cannot remember the sin You've left behind,
cannot even hope You'll change Your mind.
Beyond and above, majesty misunderstood,
the living, the living --- they praise You!

Zechariah's Song

- Zechariah's song in Luke 1:67-79 and the idea of salvation in deliverance, covenant (who God is), know (that God is God), and serving God.

Zechariah's Song --> Luke 1:68-79
"Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel,
because he has come and has redeemed his people.
He has raised up a horn of salvation for us
in the house of his servant David
(as he said through his holy prophets of long ago),
{DELIVERANCE}salvation from our enemies
and from the hand of all who hate us—
to show mercy to our fathers
{COMMUNITY} and to remember his holy covenant,
the oath he swore to our father Abraham:
to rescue us from the hand of our enemies,
and to enable us to serve him without fear
in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.
And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High;
for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him,
{KNOWLEDGE}to give his people the knowledge of salvation
through the forgiveness of their sins,
because of the tender mercy of our God,
by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
to shine on those living in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
{LAND}to guide our feet into the path of peace."

Here

The sunset is said,
the whisper of night drifts
through the stereo of my Toyota.

Oh heavy fear, heavenly fear,
I want you to be somewhere else.
It's much scarier that You are here.

And the red lights flashed,
and the semis passed, and the head-
lights kept shaking in my rearview mirror.

Over the hum of rubber,
pavement, and silence of the
nothing that happened and still happens.

Awareness flickered and
died, like every lit and then
driven by sign that lines these lines.

Words short but lost,
face seen but then forgot,
the dreadful, unnoticed God.

I Sing a New Song

The hymn has not submerged, for once,
these splintered sticks and slabs,
these boards more fit for trash,
have scarcely and trepidly held tin above,
and below escaped the thickening mud.

You have raised up and held this strength,
this salvation through this house.
From Hungarian plains may come rain,
thus the ever-threatening mud, or through it
plunge the wheels of messengers. Please come.

The satellite sits, rattles in Spanish,
preparing the way for words.
Speech intermittent, prophetic, pathetic,
curious and pushing, a chance and a promise,
"Please, take my picture now."

Sebastian, I can't pray for you.
The unknown, but you've been left on a step
just paces away from the open market,
where deliverance is offered for less than a cent.
But in spirit, these only come out in prayer.

We could whittle away time at the cave,
but I've been up all night, and trinkets might
be the least of concerns. Tim, how do
we let him into us? Into God? With nothing,
no connections, what will you grow in?

Sebastian? I have held watch for you,
I've held you when you couldn't ask or answer.
The opening in the heavens, they finally broke.
Six months old, this pressing down,
this lifting up, this tearing off, you'll never know.

In the desert, in the weight of the mud,
with faltering, foreign lip, doubtless misunderstood...
Abel could live but he is dying,
and on the tenth floor, she should die but lives.
In my presence let them know: He is.

My camera still holds the site, the little girl
with Irish hair, wide open, begging eyes.
My knees have got a list of longings, but who
must I prepare the way for? Only coming through
prayer, the one I've nothing but prayer for.