The Jerusalem Experiment

Surreal. This is the first word that comes to mind when I think about being home. I feel as though I’ve been running hard, breathing deeply, and squeezing my heart out like a wet rag these past five months. Now, I find myself sitting in my favorite Caribou, looking out across the suburban landscape that constitutes familiarity, and playfully meditating on the voice echoing in my mind, “What’s next?”

My chest thumps, and I smile at the realization (more than ever) that our God has energized creation with an inertia, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds….”(Gen 1:24)

The story of His love begins with an imperative: we’ve been created to create, to give form and function to the breath of God that, even now, races through the veins of each and every member of the human race. Apathy is a slap in the face of the fiery-eyed God who, with a certain giddiness (I’m starting to believe), looks on as we give form to His burning heart. He’s given us a wooden pattern: calvary. We need only to dream and do with cross-shaped lenses, grateful that our hearts are a bell He aims to ring.

With this in mind, as my plane began to descended into the Minneapolis/Saint Paul International Airport Sunday evening, I wrote a poem.

According to their Kind

A buried bell beneath my chest
Rocks the depths, rolls tide
Like earth beneath the sea
When the wills of coral kings collide
And this is His, His pulse, His breath
Reverberations of His grandeur
To pull back waters
like velvet curtains
Legacy
We, the Spirit’s crystalline decanter
We, the clanging of chaos answered.