More Than a Minute Ago

More Than a Minute Ago

(“Cast your burden on the Lord, and He will sustain you; He will never allow the righteous to be moved.” Psalm 55:22)

I hope you will let me be honest about the things that happened
to me
more than a minute ago.
“Everything happens for a reason,” I’ve been told,
and then watched as the horned owl rolled on down the road.
“God will never give you more than you can handle,” they have said,
and listened as their voices faded into locked conference rooms
to discuss my fate.

If you stayed more than a second
you might have seen
the callouses on my shoulder from carrying every piece of granite
know-it-alls threw on my back before
I entered the queue for the next scheduled ride on
the roller-coaster.

If it happens for a reason, you would be so wrong to intervene,
I might never learn the lesson that loneliness and suffering bring.
If I can handle it (whether you can or not) you would be dead wrong
to lift an ounce from my back. But you’ll pray for me or sing me a song
next Sunday while I dry-heave like a fetus behind the hanging suits and shirts
on the floor in the closet that smells like must.

There is nothing reasonable in leaving me in the rain,
there is nothing preordained in laying hands on me again
before you go to brunch with those who can afford it.

I’m not saying you hoarded your blessings. You just thought
Jesus was enough
and forgot
that Jesus
uses hands and feet like yours.

>So I keep rolling, I keep casting, I keep throwing, I keep lasting 
for more days than even I expected.
I keep piling, occasionally smiling, I keep hiking, I keep asking
for a God who knows how

To make me weightless, to help me regress to less than I know.
And helps me take the boulders piled on me; a God who leans in to me, 
and, Lamb and Lion carries them for me.