September 27, 2006

• I lost my writing voice.  It wasn't a sudden, split-second escape from me like a desirable mirage in the desert, but I've felt it fading slowly, softly away from me as days and days floated away and became a dawning realization this morning.  My relationship with God is wanting, and I know truly that therein lies the problem.

  Words of inspiration are so few and far in between.  They haven't scurried towards me as whispers in the night or blazing lights of revelation in the day.  No words, no impression - no urgent moments to record a fleeting thought, no storylines that dance before my eyes, scenes, scripts or lines of poetry in living color as if reality in the flesh, in human form.  No echoes of music in my ear.  No songs of joy arising from within.  Where has the babbling brook gurgling with life gone to? 

  It's been silenced -- by some irritating sense of pushyness, of urgency, of hurriedness.  No sense of peace has been able to abide here - always controlled by the controlling dictator of time - which has forcefully demanded me to write with crude, raw, common scrawl - choppy, stilted - which convey meaning in the most basic form.  No eloquence, no articulatigon, no art, no poetic craftsmanship or skill even called upon.  Just enough to make a point with volume - but not with melody or harmony -- or impression, resonation or song. 

  How words can be so ill-used!  Neither exploited nor dexterously utilized to reach its full potential because of unskilled, uncreative, banal mishandling by ordinary laity.  I've mishandled, I have lessened the glory that is due to words - the glory which words are capable of! - by my careless living -- of succumbing down the bustling river with no ounce of courage to jump on the bank, perch on a rock, to contemplate in unhurried fashion all the possibilities that lay before me.  I've failed to surrender to - denied myself the freedom to swallow gobs and gobs of - life-giving breaths of fresh air, to take in the greens of succulents and reds and oranges and pinks and blues of vibrant life all around -- rather than simply seeing "the grass", "the flowers", "the sky" -- as if they were commonplace things without all the mystery of the divine draped all over them.

  Once I begin to be driven by the deception that all can be figured out, solved, scheduled, managed, organized, and categorically spelled out and recorded like shop inventory, then I've gotten lost in the mundane, cold, sterile, scientific -- with no magic, no mystery, and no possibility of divine, breathtaking, speechless, stunning glimpses into the eternal, everlasting, ongoing, intangible, inexplicable reality for which Jesus died so that He could bestow on all of us the glorious ability to know, to taste, to partake of.  I want to live and breathe in this kind of poetic reality which He desires for me more than my newly awakening spirit has barely begun to touch upon.

  So here's to new beginnings in Jesus.

  • 4:13 pm
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