The Theology of Puddles

It’s just a patch of dirty water,

nondescript, huddled by the curb,

silently waiting for evaporation

as it reflects upon its short life,

when it is suddenly catapulted

into eternity by the sandaled feet

of a three-year-old boy.

Over at dVerse Poets, the poetry prompt is the beauty of everyday things. I don’t think I could find something more prosaic than a mud puddle. To see more poems responding to the prompt, please visit dVerse Poets.

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

Café gone fifty years

Passing the place where the café

was once, I smell strong coffee

where no coffee brews in this street

of commerce and business; the café

gone these fifty years, a few tables

with red and white checkered

tablecloths, leathered cups of dice

on each to see who would pay

the bill amid murmured conversations,

muted laughter, biscuits made

from scratch brushed with butter:

businessman’s breakfast. A car horn

blasts; a delivery truck blocks

the right of way. The smell of coffee

lingers in the humid air.

Photograph: 400 block of Gravier Street, Central Business District of New Orleans.

Doug Spurling’s “Grieving Grace”

Two classic works on grief are A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis and John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud. Lewis was writing about the death of his wife, Joy Davidman Lewis; Gunther was writing about the death of his 17-year-old son from a brain tumor. Only the Lewis work is well known today, largely because Lewis is still well known today. (Lewis died in 1963 and Gunther, a well know journalist and author, in 1970.)

Lewis wrote from the perspective of faith, although a shaken one. Gunther write from a human, non-faith perspective. Both convey the depth of the pain and loss each man experienced.

The loss that prompts grief is always hard. Lewis moved in the direction of the idea of loss as grace; joy herself seems to have gotten there before he did. But loss and the grief it prompts are the measure of the love and feeling we have for the one who dies.

Grieving Grace by Douglas Spurling, a writer and blogger (Spurling Silver), fully embraces the idea of loss as grace. It is a small book with a large theme, prompted by the death of his mother-in-law Mary. The mother of 14 and grandmother of 100+, Mary died at 87. What Spurling has done here is essentially to keep a family journal of her last days, yet raise questions that apply to all of us.

In addition to chronicling her physical decline, Spurling asks probing and sometimes unexpected questions, such as how do you tell a loved one they’re dying? What is the withdrawal from this life actually like? What characteristics are common to the dying? What are the final days and hours like?

This is a work about dying, grieving, and loss, but it is also a work about love. It takes love – a lot of it – to tell someone it’s okay to let go, to move from this physical life we know to the life we don’t know but can only guess at and hope for, really.

Grieving Grace is a private journal written for the large extended family that is Mary’s. But it surpasses that,a nd becomes a record of dying, grief, and grace for all of us.

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

Jonah: It’s Not About the Fish

For those of us who didn’t first learn about Jonah in Sunday School, the story seems scientifically impossible and a proof point that the Bible contains preposterous accounts, if not downright inaccuracies.

For those of us who did first learn the story of Jonah in Sunday School, we leave the scientific debate to others. (I don’t embrace creationism versus evolution arguments, either.) Hearing the story as a young child, all I can say is that it made sense, a truth easily grasped by children  and often far better than learned adults.

It’s not about the fish.

The story of Jonah is about many things, and to focus on the fish is to miss all of them. It’s about faith, obedience, understanding the culture and world one lives within, understanding how God works in that world, repentance, and having expectations confounded or confirmed.

Jonah is an individual whose life gets played out in a much larger context. And it’s a geopolitical story, the story of the capital city of a brutal empire being brought to its knees.

And, as Andy Stanley points out in The Grace of God, it is a perplexing story of God’s grace. Perplexing, in that the Assyrians deserved anything but grace. What they did deserve was destruction for their brutality and the evil they committed upon the surrounding nations and peoples (they were the ones who conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, whose people disappeared into history).

And yet, the fish notwithstanding, Jonah makes his way to Nineveh, and preaches repentance for three days (the same number of days he was inside the fish; and likely the same number of days in his “anger at God” period at the end of the story). The city listens to his preaching, repents, and is spared God’s wrath, much to Jonah’s chagrin. He knew this would happen, because he knew God as a God of grace.

And it made him angry.

I identify with the Assyrians. I did nothing to deserve God’s grace. Nothing. Just the opposite, in fact. And I was grateful for it.

And I identify with Jonah. Don’t all those people today who deny and ridicule the very notion of God, the people think his church is filled with stupid yahoos, the people who murder and destroy and tear at the very fabric of our society, the people who are trying to force an anti-Christian underpinning on everything in the culture, well, surely they deserve to get theirs, right?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps they will hear the call to repentance; perhaps Christians will articulate a call to repentance. Perhaps God will spare them too. The story of Jonah is also the story opf how anyone, no matter how evil, can repent and be forgiven.

Yes, the story of Jonah is a story of God’s Grace.

Led by Jason Stayszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Grace of God by Andy Stanley. To see more posts on this chapter, “Puzzled by Grace,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Sally Pesavento via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Nautilus, broken

Partially embedded in the sand,

a nautilus, chambered, broken

perhaps by driftwood or a foot,

carelessly trod until the crunch

was heard. Pieces glisten

in their sheen; the sound of the sea

fractured yet still identifiable.

This poem is submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. To see more poems, please visit dVerse Poets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

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

Poetry Review: A Clown at Midnight

The performance is over; the applauding audience is now asleep at home, dreaming of fire eaters, trapeze artists, and dancing elephants. So what does a clown do at midnight?

Down these mean streets a bad joke walks alone,

bruised head held low, chin tucked in tight, eyes down,

defiant. He laughs and it turns into a moan.

His wife left years ago, and his kids all groan,

claim they have never of him, and frown,

Down these mean streets a bad joke walks alone…

What does a clown do after midnight? He uses rhyme, and homonyms, poetic lines all ending in the same sound, a “new formalism” that seems almost offhand, deliberately careless, but still very tightly structured and controlled.

A Clown Walks at Midnight: Poems is Andrew Hudgins’s new collection, officially published today by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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

Photography by George GrimmHowell via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Ooching” Toward Success

Last year, a friend of mine asked for advice. His organization was being relentlessly criticized on social media, and most of the criticism was unfounded. He said the criticism could be easily answered—except for one problem.

His organization wouldn’t let him mount a defense. The strategy was to emphasize only positive things and look to others to defend the organization. But no one was doing that—they were waiting for the organization itself to act first.

What could he do?

We talked. I suggested some small action so as to be almost unnoticeable—select one of the criticisms, answer it, and see what happened. He eventually tried it.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling, where I'm discussing part 2 of Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.