Three Strands Before the Lord returns, three strands will entwine to prepare the way. The practice of Sabbath rest, the table of hospitality, and the altar of repentance. This braided cord will gather us to each other and Him. It is the strangers road to Calvary nestled within the walls of our homes–our sharpest tool…
Calculating Age
Age is that hard cold number that starts out too hot to touch and cools through the passing of seasons. It’s that thing you show off with sheepish glow and pride at two and a half and wave with banners and glitter at 21. Then the magic number pops up and you grab it to…
Justice
Justice Society demands vengeance but cannot bear justice, requires morality but cannot stand faultless under a searchlight, expects order but despises authority, screams for open borders and the acceptance of the tired, poor huddled masses yearning to be free but won’t share a meal and offer a bed to a stranger in need. We are…
A New Poem
A New Poem I love a new poem that I must read over and over. First run is a foreign language, but as I go through the words one by one— turning them over and over, weighing, measuring, giving them the tender respect they deserve—then the phrases, metaphors, similes, word spacings, and stanza breaks, it…
Peering into the Dark
Peering into the Dark Friends and family line up orderly, row by row, to pay respect to the widow’s dead husband. Each peers and pauses with reverence. But the corpse is a mirror, reflecting every mourner’s face. That glimpse into the grave is deep and dark and universal, but only for a second. You can’t…
Barely Smelling Bacon
Barely Smelling Bacon Out on the lake’s edge in the blackness of a remote mountain cabin, she sits straight up in bed peering into the dark and blinking to see better. A creature is shuffling on the rocks outside, rummaging, and brushing against the outside log walls. Then scratching, is it the sound of claws…
Love and Beauty
Love and Beauty How we yearned for the earth to release, to let go its weightless gold and allow the revelation to fill our souls. And suddenly it bloomed, parchment leaf by parchment leaf shimmering in the light until our whole world brimmed with the treasures of unfolding fall. In those sweet …
Canyon Carvings
Canyon Carvings What words are carved of You Oh, Ancient of Days across these canyon walls? I see You, think if You, yearn for You in every crevasse. What is Your Name? What motivates You? All this glory around me tells me a story about You. But as it turns out, this is my story….
Extraordinary
Extraordinary There isn’t an eagle’s feather, pine needle, or postage stamp of sky that doesn’t silently shout extraordinary lengths— in this extravagant showcase of quaking life. It became necessary to span the distance between God and humankind. Our cosmos is a fading fragment of the unapproachable light in which He dwells. We…
Bonnie Saul Wilks 