Be yourself - Everyone else is taken (Oscar Wilde)
Eternity’s breath whispers life,
It’s gentle rhythm beating,
With the sounds of,
Loves eternal longing,
That beats in all our hearts,
None is forgotten,
All creation is heard,
Restoring loving, kindness,
The voice of love whispers,
Time to turn to me.
We created a place for givings face,
Where hope and love could be done,
Then it changed,
It seemed like an instant,
But was it always there?
Selflessness turned to selfishness,
Waiting to escape,
It’s ugly face,
Turns hope to fear,
Trust to anxiety,
Faith to despair.
My restless heart,
Creating answers, seeking hope,
Ends with questions,
Truth is an elusive dream,
With the tragic gap between words and love,
Love’s search must end at its beginning,
So truth can find its home,
Resting in its source,
But, its beauty lived in my heart.
God’s gracious love is uncovered,
Today it has lit up my morning,
My day will be transformed by his love,
I am forgiven,
His wounds and my wounds shared,
Compassion reached out to me,
And said, “I understand”,
Desperation marked my every thought.
I believed that my God had deserted me,
Everything was stripped away,
Only my naked soul was left,
I thought God stopped listening to my prayers,
I believed my sin was too great,
To be forgiven and restored.
I didn’t recognise the first tears,
then I saw that she had been weeping,
For me a chance encounter,
A simple purchase,
That took me to a broken marriage,
The deep sadness of love quashed,
Life now lived in loneliness,
I never would have known,
Except I took to the time to ask,
About the moisture glistening on her cheeks.26
“Still” was there while the earth thundered around,
“Still” had its own sounds,
That drifted in with Creation’s voice,
A whisper in the wind,
The call of the morning birds,
A call to hope born from “Still”.
All that God shows me,
Everything I celebrate this morning,
These are examples of infinite power,
Expressing infinite love,
To a grateful child.
I will search out God today,
For new ways to thank Him,
Celebrating eternal love,
That is His gift to me.
I love how his words fill my heart,
They are a deep well speaking life words,
Day after day they come to me,
Forgiving words that free me from regret,
Praise words that let me enter his creative work,
Love words that show me I belong.
There my friends found me,
They listened to my circular tale,
My words seeking their source,
In the pain and the lonely tears,
There emerged a glimmer of hope.
Life without God at the centre,
Is a futile grasp at self importance,
Life is fully appreciated when God is most important,
The path to understanding this is difficult,
I wanted to give up,
Because, I thought God gave up on me,
This was not true,
God was leading me to incredible opportunity,
Far more than what I could create myself.
Grant me forgiveness today,
Give me the lasting joy of offering hope,
By not joining in the clamour for blood,
Instead make my life a healing balm,
My words a soothing sound,
For the broken lives encountered each day,
My broken heart,
Broken open in plain sight of everyone,
Open to give and receive forgiveness,
Each day a small victory for hope.
Abundance is my daily experience of God,
Blessing is my praise song,
God’s will is discovered by his creation,
We do not determine its path,
We learn it through obedience,
Each day a new lesson is learned,
My life a constant unfolding of hope.
Joining Spirit and action,
Soul and work,
Heart and calling.
(Chris Gribble)
The ultimate outcome of work transcends the actual activities that a person engages in. Work is an important part of fulfilling our need to belong.
I wrote the three lines above when feeling very disappointed with an institution I love deeply. What came to my heart were the three things that were missing in an encounter with people who didn’t know how to use their power. Rather than grace I saw power wielded with the intent to cause damage.
Disappointment in our work needs to be faced if we are to understand transformation. Disappointment means that we take stock of what is reality and allows us to begin to depend on a truer foundation. Avoidance of the reality of disappointment will deny us all that life is because all of us will be broken hearted at some point.
Parker Palmer in his book, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, talks of the wounds that are caused by our institutions. For many people their experience of work is dealing with daily disappointments where wounds are inflicted by those who wield power unwisely.
In my life’s most recent transformation the most difficult part of moving forward is recognising the disappointment that lay behind that transformation. But, as David Whyte says in “Consolations”, courage is in embracing that disappointment. There is no pathway on this earth that doesn’t involve being let down in some way.
As I wrote the poem Grace visited, I went to a place where I was not good enough. Confronting this statement was one of my life’s biggest disappointments. It was a lonely place where I for a while I lost hope. Fortunately I didn’t stay there forever and over time I have begun to see a new more powerful story beginning in my life.
One of the most beautiful words that came to me is included in the final stanza, “forgiveness”. This was the source of my healing. Forgiveness and Grace give us words that understand hope and belonging.
In recent times as I have begun to re-emerge into the world of work I have considered deeply what it is that I wish to bring to the workplace. My own disappointments have spurred me to wonder how in the workplace Grace can be visited?
I wonder what such an environment will bring to the culture of an organisation? I have a conviction that in a place where grace is visited regularly the source of work, creativity will be unlocked. That instead of wounding and limiting it will be a place of discovering each person’s untapped potential.
Grace visited
My world’s cry of, “not good enough”,
Gave birth to disappointment,
It led me to life’s darkest shadow,
Powerless to lead myself into light,
Disappointment gave life to transformation,
The place that where hope can shed its light.
Disappointment’s path took me to loneliness,
Alone, silence, spoke to my soul,
While the world’s voice echoed in my head,
Silence spoke with a clear whisper,
Reflecting my deepest desire,
Connecting my heart to destiny.
In the silence I met with Grace,
He looked me in the eye,
Complete honesty in his gaze,
Then he spoke very quietly,
The words longed for by all,
“My child you belong to me.”
In the silence of despair,
And the heartbreak of disappointment,
I heard the voice of forgiveness,
It called me to know I belong,
Aloneness and silence brought recovery,
From my deepest wounds,
Knowing My heart’s healing source,
Is because of Grace’s gaze fixed on me.
Praise’s source sheds light on shadow,
From the shadow I learned about Grace,
My deepest valleys were gifts of understanding,
They are leading me to the mountaintops,
God is my trusted guide,
His perspective the gift to those who love him.
Failure is a word that I hear again and again,
That word clatters around my head,
Noisily,
Constantly,
Painfully.
Will it ever stop!
What does it take
to mark the canvas
to write the line
to play the chord
to plough the field
to cross the river
to change the world?
I have chosen my path,
My love for God is true,
Truth is my most painful choice,
Every step is a crippled limp.
School holidays are a disruptive time for our family. The kids are no longer in a familiar routine of getting up at a certain time to make sure everything is done in time to catch their school bus. They spend a lot more time around home so this means they are disruptive to my routine. There is a usually a period of tension in which we sort out the new schedule.
There is always a period of boredom where they tell me, “there’s nothing to do!” Then there is the constant asking to be given some money usually to waste on some adrenalin pumping manufactured activity.
I felt excited a couple of days ago when my youngest daughter said she wanted to make something. She wanted to make Christmas cards for the family. This was something that I was prepared to invest in.
I took her down to the local discount store and invested $20 in stuff from which she saw something that she could create. That night we were presented with a unique Christmas tree that could only have been made by her.
Out of disruption her creative spirit was sparked to do something herself. I love that out of boredom something new can emerge.
Then there is my own familiar routines. One of these is a regular walk with my wife around the escarpment of the Toowoomba Range. In this rhythm we have a few of our favourite routes that we choose as we head out on early in the morning.
A little while ago we decided to go a bit further on our regular route. That’s where we discovered the small spring that creates a waterfall, and a path that leads a little further on around the edge of the range.
As I wrote, “The Walk”, I reflected on this regular rhythm and how the physical activity refreshes my tiredness. There is something good in taking time to do something that is intrinsically boring. The real journey when walking is the one to my deepest thoughts where I can think in an unstructured way. There is no agenda when I set out on my walk and usually by the time I get home I find the day looks really hopeful. My main problem is that I often will have even more ideas of opportunities than what I know what to do with.
The nice thing that I have learned is to not rush to the next discovery. It will emerge in its own time. I couldn’t explore the spring that I found on that day but I knew it was another opportunity that would be there in its own time.
The Walk
There is a path that I like to walk,
Especially in the morning,
Where I have a view from the mountain –
Over the valley, and on a clear day,
I can see to the horizon.
Each step refreshes my tiredness,
It’s a rhythm my soul loves,
Where my spirit sees each day,
The path that takes me to my deepest thoughts,
About God and life and love and pain.
Today on my familiar walk,
I discovered a new path,
That led me to a spring,
That I didn’t expect,
Time only allowed a brief glimpse,
But, tomorrow will give the chance,
To explore the path not yet travelled,
An opportunity waiting to emerge.
