Reflection in polished glass

The child in the mirror spoke

back to me, responding

to a question I’d forgotten;

he didn’t remember the answer

to the question I’d forgotten

and so we stared into the mirror,

realizing each victory contains

the seeds of defeat, and each defeat

contains the seeds of hope.

I looked to the sun, risen,

and understand the contradiction.

Over at dVerse Poets, the Saturday poetry prompt is about twins, or doubles, or two of a kind. Take a look and see what others write.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Tumbling at the Nightstand

So I read a story about West Texas

that I didn’t think I’d like at first,

dusty and dry and tumbleweed gray,

but I did, and behind stood, waiting,

a poet’s Abyss, tumbling into darkness,

followed by a Spanish poet,

the Spanish poet, finding New York

before he tumbled in civil war

back home, but he wrote his poem

in two languages side by side which

makes the book shorter if you skip

the Spanish side, but it didn’t

because I read a few of them aloud

anyway, tumbling into hard consonants

and flamenco music and the tragedy

of life cut short, and I read another one

in Spanish and realized without benefit

of translation that it was a romance.

In case you’re wondering, the three books cited here are Thunder and Rain by Charles Martin, My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman, and Poet in New York by Federico Garcia Lorca.

Photograph via The Quantum Biologist. 

Billy Coffey’s “When Mockingbirds Sing”

Billy Coffey is a storyteller, one of the best writing today. Even more, he’s a natural storyteller, the words seemingly rolling right on to the page. To read a story by Coffey is to sit in a diner, preferably somewhere in South, and listen while waitresses refill coffee cups and slide a bit of lemon meringue pie across the table in your direction. And the stories do come.

Coffey’s first novel, Snow Day, told the story of a man facing the loss of his job when it snows, giving jobs and loss of jobs a brief respite. It’s a day when he will learn what’s truly important, simply by considering the stories of the people he runs into.

His second novel, Paper Angels, involves a man recovering from an injury in a hospital, and a visitor arrives to help him sort through a box of what looks like utterly worthless things. But each thing has a story, and the man watches his own story unfold as the box is sorted.

And now there’s When Mockingbirds Sing. It’s ambitious. It goes beyond, well beyond, the weaving of interrelated stories of his first two books, to become a unified story, a large story with a large theme. Through the characters in the town of Mattingly, Coffey lays open the questions of what is faith, what is doubt, what is prophecy, and what happens when they collide in the lives or people.

Tom and Ellen Norcross and their daughter Leah have moved to Mattingly, both to seek reduced pressures from Tom’s counseling workload and to repair a marriage that is not doing well. Their daughter Leah is a quiet child with a stutter, and with something else – an imaginary friend she calls the Rainbow Man, who inspires here to paint extraordinary pictures.

Leah says the Rainbow Man has told her to give the first picture to Barney Moore, who cares for his stroke-paralyzed wife Mabel. Barney sees numbers painted on the picture, bets the numbers in the lottery and comes up a winner with $250 million. When he announces what happens at church, life in Mattingly begins to blow apart, and Leah finds herself both sought after and reviled. Her one friend, Allie Granderson, sticks by her, however (and the character of Allie is drawn so well that she threatens to steal the story at times).

Then Leah paints another picture, one no one can figure out. But it is a sign of something that’s coming, something bad, and everyone’s lives will be changed because of it.

While Leah (and Allie) sit at the center of the story, Coffey has drawn a fine supporting cast – the legalistic deacon, the pastor impressed with his own success, a father who rejects faith because of the damage he believes it’s caused in the lives of the people he counsels, a mother who in her loneliness is turning to alcohol, the small-town sheriff. Together they move toward what the Rainbow Man has told Leah will come.

It’s an ambitious novel, and it works, and works well. Coffey has aimed at large themes, and hit them with a practiced eye. These are bedrock themes, especially for people of faith, and Coffey doesn’t duck the hard questions. He’s written When Mockingbirds Sing strong and true, and we tackle the hard questions with him.

Photograph: Northern Mockingbird, courtesy Birder’s Lounge.

David, Poetry, and Grace

A few years back, I was studying the life of David, one of the most complex, and most humanly real, people in the Bible. His life was often a life of extremes, and his personal character could be as well.

Known as the man “after God’s own heart,” David lusted for another man’s wife and had her husband murdered in battle; was responsible for the destruction of the town of Nob because he lied; and came close to seeing his own family and dynasty destroyed because he wouldn’t take action against a rebellious son.

And yet he killed Goliath, helping defeat the Philistines; unified Israel and regained lost territory; sought forgiveness; and was told by God that his kingdom would have no end.

He was the boy shepherd who became a king, the warrior who became a hunted outcast, and the king who nearly lost his throne.

One of the things I did during my study was to write a number of poems about David and some of his circumstances. (If you’re interested, you can read them here: David, Hillside; Shammah’s Psalm of Lament; Madness in My Royal City; Michal; Jonathan; and The Gratitude of a King.

It was one of the first times I had used poetry to help me through a Bible or character study.

I like the fact that David was a poet, having written a considerable number of the psalms. Some of the most heart wrenching, human statements in any language are David’s psalms.  

I wrote the poems over a several-week period, and as I did I became increasingly aware that one theme dominated David’s story. That theme was God’s grace.

David was anointed to be the future king when he was still a boy, and for no other reason than God’s grace (even the prophet Samuel was surprised).

David was no match for Goliath, but he unexpectedly took him down through God’s grace.

David repeatedly escaped Saul’s murderous wrath over and over again.

David’s son attempt[ted to seize the throne, and almost succeeded.

And David was forgiven, over and over again.

David’s life is the story of God’s grace. He didn’t deserve any of it – quite the contrary – but he was continually washed in God’s grace.

Like us.

“While the details of our lives may overlap little with David’s,” writes Andy Stanley in The Grace of God, “there is one thing we all have in common with him. We’ve all put God’s grace to the test. We have broken the law. We’ve been irresponsible with his blessing. We’ve confessed a sin only to turn right around and repeat it.”

And yet, Stanley says, “If David’s story is any indication, grace has no end.”

Led by Jason Stayszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Grace of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Sustained by Grace,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Painting: David and His Harp, by Marc Chagall.

Poetry at Work: The Poetry of the Interview

I was part of an interview team, talking individually with four candidates for a communication research job. Human Resources had provided us with a set of “behavioral interview” questions, which meant we would be asking things like “What’s the biggest failure you’ve ever experienced?” and “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?”

We followed the HR guidelines, but I asked one additional question, and it turned out to be the differentiator.

“What do you think of our web site?”

Three of the four gushed about how wonderful it was. The fourth said it was rather boring and uninteresting.

Guess which candidate we hired?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Worldviews, Villains, and Decisions

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading about and considering the subject of worldviews – what they are, where they come from, and how they affect our day-to-day lives. As Chip Heath and Dan Heath point out in Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, a worldview is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it, and how we make decisions to live and work in it.

One problem with a worldview is that we tend to seek out information that agrees with our worldview, and filter out the information that doesn’t. Consider how seriously informed you would be if you got all of your information on the Obama Administration from either Rush Limbaugh or Chris Matthews – a steady diet of ridicule or chills running up your leg.

If we all did that, we would end up with a national government that was so polarized that nothing would get done.

OK, I’m trying to make a point here, because that’s exactly what we do have.

But it’s not just government. Think about how a worldview can affect a workplace, a church, or a relationship, simply by filtering our information that doesn’t conform to what we already believe.

The Heaths would say, and I would agree, that desperately holding on to a worldview at the expense of reality will, at a minimum, lead to bad decisions.

In the book, the call this “conformation bias,” and individuals and organizations do it all the time. It’s one of the “four villains of decision making” they describe in Decisive. The other three are narrow framing, or unduly limiting your options; relying on short-term emotions (if you’re upset, always chill before making a decision); and overconfidence, or having too much faith in our own predictions (and we all do this).

They’re not saying you have to jettison your basic beliefs if you want to make good decisions. But they do say that you should question why you react or respond in certain ways, and examine exactly why you believe one decision or course of action is better than another.

It could be that you confirmation bias – your worldview – is showing.

Can you think of an example of when the worldview an individual, a company, an organization, or a nation led to disaster? (There are some obvious ones – Nazi Germany – and some not-so-obvious ones – like Enron.)

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading the book discussion this month on Decisive. A post will be published each Monday in June (and I’m guest-posting on the book next week). To view the discussion and the comments, please visit The High Calling.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Viking Raid

Under a cloudless sky she sat

staring out at the sea shimmering

silver in the morning sun,

searching for the promised glimpse

of a sail upon the horizon, a glimpse

unlike the first, when sails appeared

and surrounded them, their tiny isle,

and bearded men in horned helmets

rained terror and destruction, except

for the blond man with a young beard

who claimed her with hands gentle

in their  pillaging roughness.

And now, the sleeping child next to her,

she stares out at the sea shimmering

and feels the terror of not seeing

a sail upon the horizon.