The Audacity!

 The Audacity!

(“God…set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace.” Galatians 1:15b)

The audacity!
The angels, the pagans, the sand dunes, the sea
all laughed like a house full of comedy. He came
into town,
his Harley roaring,
his passion soaring,
his vision storing every idea he had planned
from the midlands to the coast. He hit the ground
running
and collected food, mostly cans.
And fed 100 or more on Christmas two years
in a row.
He did all he could, for all he could,
and never locked the windows or the doors.
He had fought in the most unpopular of wars
and knew he would never leave anyone outside in the cold
again.
Agent orange had just begun to tax his holy obsession.
He would ration his health for all the saints he had yet to meet.

Houses crumble over time. But they crash in a moment.
Pain works its way slowly, but pours over the threshold meant
to keep it from escaping. He was never idle, but
he knew how to rest. But how to rehitch his body and mind
to the original epiphany; he found he was losing his breath.

With dreams bigger than self-esteem, he embraced the pastoral
scenes
along a wide lazy river. I cannot say that another poison
entered his system,
but agent orange was volatile and could have mixed with
local politics
to burn through the hope that surrounded his heart.

Eventually the two by fours rot after the years, eventually the roof leaks
from dew as much as rain. Eventually the abandoned self,
once up for any noisy gathering,
cannot abide more than a friend at a time.

Sometimes life crashes so hard on someone, even one called
from birth,
that the mental,
the physical,
the emotional pain
cannot be contained.

We would do well to audaciously
dress the undeserved wounds.