I Might Mend My Boat

I Might Mend My Boat

(“We are God’s creation. He created us to belong to Christ Jesus. Now we can do good works. Long ago God prepared these works for us to do.” Ephesians 2:10)

I never expected smooth sailing,
but this felt like a peaceful place to land.
The shore wasn’t far from dreams and visions
and the waves lapped gently most of the time.
Yet today, when all the universe rattled like a grain elevator,
I wanted to hear a fellow sailor say
they knew what it was like

When the swells were ferocious,
when they hit at acute angles,
when they propelled you higher than
the houses that hugged the narrow shore.

Those were the days that the box where I lock my troubles away
creaked at its hinges and threatened to unleash a bigger storm
than the river’s wild crashing.

But these days everyone’s boxes are full,
everyone’s docks are splintered,
everyone’s words are a slice of white bread
parading as pie.
Every person I’ve told about my journey
is far too polite,
(at least the ones who knew me when I embarked)
which I know is the nice way of saying
they wish I could just work things out,
could see the storm would pass,
would agree that everything happens for a reason,
(when I ask about the ones who died in the shipwreck
they tell me about the one that was saved)

They tell me to have friends I should be one;
but I have been one from the day I arrived.
I hear some say I’ve gone off the deep end,
but they have no idea how deep and which end.

If I had the strength, or the time, or the help,
or the tools, or the sunshine, or the courage,
or the health (oh mental health that wraps the
brain in cavernous sludge), I might mend my boat.
But my body would not allow me to enjoy it again.

No one likes lament,
no one like shipwreck stories without
survivors.
No one likes the brains that
capture darkness at noon and
silence in cafes full of burgers and
retired men.

And, if I am created, if I am

Art

Then, let me be the art that I am.

Like I said,
no one likes lament. We want
broth of carbonated shallows,
we want to wade in frothy waters.
We would rather tie up the loose ends
than admit walking barefoot sometimes hurts.

But, if I am art,
and am made of mud,
let my artwork be earthy and
my tears salty and loud. Let my heartache
in quarter time
be the one song that someone needs

Who has forgotten their own.

God Made This Day

God Made This Day

“When times are good, be happy: but when times are bad, consider this: God has made the one as well as the other. Therefore, no one can discover anything about their future.” Ecclesiastes 7:14

Imagine yourself on a boat or small ship. You have sailed solo quite a distance and now are out of view of any land. All around is only water and a clear sky and the spring sun warmly shining down. The weather is perfect. The temperature is just warm enough, perhaps in the low 70s, and the water is still. From time to time small ripples wrinkle the water’s surface, but mostly it is smooth and unruffled.

You stare at the sky that surrounds you. Every way you turn, the color is the same. The sky is washed with the bright pastel blue of a cloudless day. You sit back to take it all in breathing the air. There is nothing of earth about it; no mud, no sand, no engine emissions. It smells like water, but more. You think that if bread could be baked of simply H2O it would have this aroma. It is so fresh you take one deep breath after another, which puzzles you. Rarely, if ever do you pay attention to your breathing. But in this beautiful moment you do.

You scan the sky again, starting at the zenith above you and begin to follow the palette of blue down to the horizon. The sky, a deep brushwork blue overhead, turns lighter as it meets the horizon in a whitewash of cerulean.

The water transforms the sky from its pale monochrome to a silvery mix of blue and green. Even with very little wind, the surface of the water shimmers. With the slightest breeze, tiny diamonds seem to burst and shine above the water. Your sense of awe expands.

As you take it all in over the early afternoon, you feel peaceful, calm and content. This is the life. This is what my soul needed. This is why I bring my boat out here. (Everyone knows you don’t really fish.) And in the sort of exclamation that only comes from a satisfied and solitary place, you exhale loudly, “I am so blessed!” And you are. And, even if you don’t believe in God, you still would probably use the phrase. It just seems right.

But in the moment of your reverie you feel the wind pick up a bit. Not much at first. You’ve been on the water enough times to know the calm moment was a rarity. You consider turning for shore, but you are not concerned quite yet. You want to embrace the day and inner peace you are experiencing.

You glance at the horizon again and now become concerned. The horizon has changed. Now, above the water heavy cumulus clouds are building. Rising high above the water with their flattened undercarriage, they are already dumping heavy rain and are moving toward you. No longer silver, both the sky and water are boiling into a deep and threatening gray.

The water is choppier as the waves increase. All waves have two attributes: frequency and amplitude. On the boat, you feel the frequency increase as the waves are swept along by the wind. Frequency is simply the rate at which a wave moves past a fixed location. It can also be expressed as the distance from one quest to another in a moving wave.

Amplitude refers to the height of the wave. It is measured from the trough, the lowest part of the wave, to its crest. So, a three-foot wave is one that is 36 inches from trough to crest. On the boat, not only are the waves coming more frequently, but their amplitude has increased. What once perhaps rocked your boat a bit now, with the greater force of higher waves, threatens to capsize your vessel. Your perfect day is becoming a perfect storm. A few minutes before you were saying, “I am so blessed!” Now, “Blessed” is the last word that comes to mind. (You can substitute your own.)

The Teacher in Ecclesiastes wants us to remember that life is just like that. We can go on for days with everything going right, no major disruptions, our kids obey us (or at least we think they do). We love our job, we have close friends we enjoy, our marriage is, well, a good marriage. (Which means, yes, you fight, but you work it out.) You haven’t received a speeding ticket in over a month, rush hour traffic has been unusually light, and you even have enough savings to take your kids on a vacation of a lifetime. You would say, “I am so blessed.”

The Teacher tells us to be happy during these times. Don’t feel bad when things are going well. Just like the man on the boat, drink in every good thing. Enjoy when life goes well, and the storms are afar off.

But then he asks us to consider something when things go poorly: “God has made one (day) as well as the other.” Uh oh! In other words, when things get stormy and everything you believed gets turned upside down, remember, God made that time (or season) as well. It was easy for the man in the boat when the water was still, and the sky was clear. It is easy for us when finances, family and friends, health, plans and direction all seem to work out the way we expected. It is easy to say, “I am so blessed!” Because we feel blessed. We feel blessed by positive things: quality relationships, finances in good order, etc. But we also feel blessed by negative things: no downsizing at work, very little friction in relationships, etc.

Let things go bad, though, and how well do we feel blessed now? Come on, it’s just me typing this and you reading it; you can be honest. No matter how often we are trained to say, “I’m too blessed to be stressed”, we get stressed. And often for good reason. Storms can rise on open water at any moment and from anywhere. And can they in life. You lose a job. You go through a divorce. You are diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. You have medical needs that have drained all your finances. Just imagine experiencing one of those life events and exclaiming, “I am so blessed!”

But that is not what the Teacher is advising. He is not asking us to evaluate if God is in the good raise we got as well as our struggle with alcohol. He is asking us to remember that God made both days. He did not necessarily make the circumstances happen, but whatever circumstances do happen: God is in that day.

I believe this will make a difference for a lot of people. In the mid-90s I was making over $60,000 per year; more than I had made in my life. For that time our family was able to enjoy many experiences we wouldn’t have otherwise. But, consider this. While my income increased, I had friends who were out of work for years. Was God with me and not with them? Of course not. We were both functioning on “the same day.” The same day I sold $50,000 of computer equipment to a hospital a friend of mine was searching for work to support his family. But we were both in that “same day”.

I grant, when life is tough, it is really hard to say, “I am so blessed”. Here’s a clue: Don’t say it. I have just ended an entire year without earning a penny. I took early retirement for medical reasons and have been attempting to qualify for Disability Insurance. Now living with relatives, not pastoring a church, across the country from friends and a place we called home, I have found it difficult to say, “I am blessed”.

Once I considered this passage, though, I found myself able to say, “God has made this day.” Dear one, no matter what you are going through, God is with you. You may not feel “blessed”, and that is okay. Don’t let anyone put you down for that. But, if you can find a way to say, “I may not feel blessed, but I know God is with me, because He made this day just like any other,” it may bring you to a place of hope. The day everything went right? God made it. The day when your soul felt like it was boiling over? God made that one too.

God has made this day.