The Jerusalem Experiment

There have been days over the course of the past four and a half months when while sitting in class or standing atop some precipice overlooking the Biblical landscape I thought my head would explode. New information raced along electrified neurons like speed skaters atop an Olympic track.

But most of the time, my interaction with the bones, stones, sand and shoreline of Scripture superseded words and cast my heart deep into the realm of mystery. These things are both clothing me and beyond me.

I’m willing to say, “I don’t know” a lot more.

As devotion has increased, pretense has waned. I’ve started writing poetry again–a means to perhaps reflect the way in which my soul has been wooed into mystery.

This morning I sat in a coffee shop pondering these things: hope, truth, Christ’s cross, and the ways in which His Spirit has whittled away the things I thought the writer of Hebrews meant when he refers his intended audience (who probably walked the same broken streets I did this morning on my way to the aforementioned coffee shop) to the saving reality of faith.

This morning I wrote a poem:

I bend down beside the water’s edge
Wedge my feet between sanity and eternity
And the moon over me, all around me
Like the undiluted glory cradling the face of the prophet
And my chattering teeth preach before ancient pews
Hewn by the breath of God before time could crawl.
These words cast fog against the black
Each sentence lacking synthesis, failing to match
The rhythm of the story pulsing beneath my chest.

I rest.

The stars blinking back at me,
Knowingly
Expecting nothing but the whole of me
To bend my knees and surrender to a mystery
Encompassing both sanity and eternity.