Found My Hope

Found My Hope

(“What is faith? It is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us, even though we cannot see it up ahead.” Hebrews 11:1)

I found my hope in better things than bathing my brain
in acid poured from angry yet unredeemed. I discover
larger breaths of love that blanket the earth; sunshine and rain,
righteous, unrighteous, colonized and desert. While we cling to
our angry gods,
our tyrants who teach us
that every brain is shriveled dust except
the brain that sees the world like us;

The Father of All, with hope that pours from an endless store,
begins with more than our short-term fuse, and refuses to drag
His feet
over nuance. While the religious battle evolution and
“secular science” and “doctors without Jesus” He extends
His grace with a grasp so great it can only be missed

By those who have been blinded by their own idols
and

Those who believe they have believed the perfect faith
because they have hated the lefties, harangued the righties,
and learn that telling half-truths gets people’s attention
so much quicker than the mud-and-air we mostly know.

Lay down your taunts, they shatter faith.
Refuse to insult; the menu of the King never included
demotion or demeaning. Faith and Love are first cousins;
You cannot spit and kiss with the same lips.

I found my hope in kindness; the smell of dewy alfalfa
on an Indian Summer day. I found my assurance in compassion,
the fragrance of morning glories that follow the Sun.

Don’t tell me of everything you’ve rejected. A grocery storeprovides, on the little town’s corner, victuals to all, familiar

and foreign. But tack it “secular” and a certain segment will
bar the door, complain to the papers, boycott the soup aisle,
and puff up their chests with more hot air than an Death Valley.

I have discovered my hope in waiting for mercy,
and dropping my messy crumbles that harmed the hurting.
I found my promise in crossing the canyons that separate
with anyone who needs to opposite wall.