The Artist Uses Interruptions

He uses all things:

The setting sun
like a stop light on the horizon
pausing to paint the cloudless canvas
dome of this dimming Cathedral,
where instead we bustle in boxes
and sleep in our motor exhaust

The twilight interrupted
by an airplane, tiny as a gnat
across the wet paint, streaking
a sliver of light in its wake,
a pen knife unsealing the sky
like an open letter, reading

The alarming message of morning:
"Not another night shall pass -
the Day has come like a thief"

Sing for Me

But when I stepped up to the microphone, I heard it

It was the voices of the brothers by my side

They were singing out my songs when the song in me had died

- Andrew Peterson, Shine Your Light On Me

O Lord, open my lips,

and my mouth with declare Your praise.

Psalm 51:15

Sometimes I sing.

Sometimes I sing for others.

Sometimes I need others to sing for me.

My family and I walked into church, late, just as the worship band was finishing the first congregational song. We found open seats near the back of the sanctuary, slipping into them like stealth agents during the opening prayer.

Looking past the crowd to the stage, I was happy to see that a good friend of mine was sitting behind the drum kit. The Sundays when he plays always have an added bonus for me. I enjoy his drumming because I know his heart – I know why he is there on stage. Drums are his voice. The rhythm is his praise to God. And as he and the other band members worship, the rest of us are drawn in to join their song. There is one drum beat, one heartbeat of a community in common.

After the prayer, the band played another song. I looked up to the screen for the lyrics, but I continued to listen to the drums. I marked the skill, and I delighted in the excellence of the music we were making together, echoes of the offering our hearts were lifting to God. Yet even as I became aware of the beauty of such a moment, I also could not help but notice that my heart was largely unaffected by it all. My singing was stale, unmoved; I had not yet noticed the boys standing two rows in front of us.

Soul Simplicity

The soul's dangers are complex:

To listen to circumstances over the heart,

To listen to the heart over community,

To listen to community over God,

To listen to God and not obey,

To obey God and not love,

To love the many over

God alone.

The City Surgery

Look from the high hospital window

Upon a city vast and vaporous
Like its people, car lights coursing
Through street-veins, life
Beating, streaming underneath
The nocturnal orb, bright, steady
Like the light over a surgery table

Nine floors up, nine hours out
Past the noon-day operation
That brought us to this
Window, watching a city to which
We do not exist, ghosts
Like the Spirit that hovers over,
Cutting, stitching, breaking, mending
The never-sleeping Nineveh
Even now. Why should He not care?

Turn to the dim hospital room
This side of the soundless glass
Between us and the city surgery,
My wife alongside the crib, asleep
A moment, before machines
By the bed begin their blinking, beeping,
Signs of life of the little one within:

Lothlorien

A fan recently sent me this video he made using my song, Lothlorien. A big thanks to Derek Sawchuk. The song lyrics are posted below.

(For the less nerdy, Lothlorien is a wooded realm of the High Elves in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.)

A Thimble of Christ's Sorrow

A thimble of Christ's sorrow
Has in it more joy
Than all the world's oceans
Of ecstasy

Saturday Mornings

Most of my Saturday mornings have been spent down a country dirt road in Salem, AL, outside a little house surrounded by a 30-acre wood. Our house shared that dirt road with the homes of two uncles and our big red barn. At one time, that barn housed chickens, goats, and the horses that my uncles would ride over the wooded landscape. My uncles made trails all throughout the woods for those horse rides, and in the process, they cleared the forest pathways of my childhood. I can roam those trails in my mind still today: through the barn gate, across the iron-grated bridge over the creek, and into the hush of sun-streaked tree tops and neighboring wildlife. I would spend many hours there in solitude, trekking the familiar trails, exploring beyond them as far as I dared.

Sometimes a city friend would come over, and he would want to get up early and take our BB guns out squirrel hunting. We never saw a single squirrel, and that was probably okay with me. The forest was a magical place, more fit for a sword or wizard’s staff than a gun. My dad once made for me a wooden sword and shield to wield on my forest adventures. I couldn’t have been more pleased if I had been Arthur pulling Excalibur from the Stone. The forest was my kingdom, and I its princely protector. I loved the place: every tree of the forest, every babble of the creek that flowed through it, every stone in the creek bed, every blade of grass on creek bank and field, and every warm breeze that bent those blades, blowing past us, whispering mysteries of fleeting childhood.

On the border of my kingdom, my eldest uncle’s house sat, its back to the dirt road. The front of the house faced the forest. Even then, even with my love for the land, this seemed odd to me. Why build your front door facing out of sight, away from the road, as if to shy from its connection to society?