This is my story, this is my song

I grew up in a home where the gospel was consistently proclaimed and constantly lived out. From a very young age I was memorizing Bible passages, learning songs of praise to the Lord, and gaining a lot of head knowledge dealing with the Bible, God, and how He would have me live. Although I knew these things, it wasn’t until I was six years old that the Lord really brought me from knowing as  fact that Jesus died on the cross, to realizing that I was a sinner who deserved eternal punishment because of my sin against the Lord and that putting my faith in His death on the cross to do what I couldn’t do was the only way for me to be saved. Even at that young age, God brought me to repentance, and I begged him to save me. I remember a week when every night I would be so afraid that God had not actually listened to my prayers, and when I was put to bed, I would beg him over and over to save me. My mom talked me through knowing my assurance in the way that God had changed my heart to desire Him and from that point on, God was faithful to begin changing me!

 That He had really worked in my heart was evident in my conviction of sin, in my desire to read my Bible, and in my new responses to the proclaimed word when my dad (who has always been my pastor) would preach. I remember, at six years old, listening to a sermon on the throne room scene in the book of Isaiah and being in awe of the holiness of God. This is an attribute of His that I am still incredibly moved by and love to think about.

I was baptized when I was 7, excited to publicly declare my allegiance to Christ, and God has been faithful to consistently work in my sanctification. With each new year, and with stages of maturity He has taught me and impressed upon my heart new things, and I am so thankful that He is committed to my sanctification.

This sanctification process has not always been easy, I have had times, some more memorable to me than others, where I struggled with whether I truly believed in God and this was mostly born out of seeing my unworthiness to be His as He revealed more of my sin to me, but God brought me to my knees and answered these questions with Himself and I saw how firm the grip He has on my heart is. And I know that it was never anything in me, but solely His grace and powerful love to me in my sinfulness that accomplished my salvation and declares my justification.

The things that He has most recently been impressing on me are convictions of the importance of being an instrument to love people all around me, and how crucial this is to my witness and ministry, that we have been so loved, that we must be showing this degree of love to others. Another thing He is impressing me with is the importance of this love in and amongst a church body, and being committed to the Bride of Christ and loving each other in our communities, striving for maturity in our Saviour together.

I love the Lord, He has heard my voice, my prayers, and has a love that will not let me go. 

kickdrumjuggernaut

i want to hurtle through

the night just like a

dervish spinning juggernaut

strapped to the belly of a 

dragon, beasting past the 

spatial patterns

streaming at the 

speed of light 

a hyper-prismic

plot conundrum

falling through the

nightmare's hunt

and screaming out a

lover's tune

the kickdrum looks like fire when

the beats ignite my heart.

love song

curl up in the palm;

The palm of my hand

A shadow will cover 

the tears on your face

the shadow my wings

will cast to protect

My love is your keeper

my faithful love stands

a guard for your back

to safeguard your way

the lions of peril

may make your steps weak

But fear not the night

because I never sleep.

A story i'm writing...

                She glanced out the window toward the bay, her bread bowl steaming with a chowdery smell. She came here every three days when living alone became something too hard for her to bear. She toyed with her iPod for a few seconds before selecting a Jonsi song to people watch to. The funny thing about people watching to music was that there are so many rhythms for walking. No matter what music she played, there was bound to be a vein of sightseers whose inner rhythm synced with her iPod.  Some days all the portly businessmen seemed to be stepping along to the beats of Usher’s Yeah.  Other days it was the expectant mothers who appeared to be marching along to the Orinoco Flow of Enya. Today it was the groups of young college students who were exploring Fisherman’s Wharf, hoping to see the seals, scurrying to the beats of Animal Arithmetic.

                She did not people watch simply for the amusement of imagining them dancing, it satisfied something in her heart, or some other deeply seated integral organ. The pangs of loneliness had begun in her early teenage years, when her small group of elementary friends had, by no fault of their own, drifted apart. At that point in her life there had always been a social event to be a part of, a way to pretend that this loneliness was not there. When she realized in eleventh grade that almost no one was walking to the same inner rhythm that she was, her kind nature had glossed it over, but there were pockets of despair at this concession that cropped up from time to time. Having reached her twenty-third year, living on her own in the big city, pursuing some dream of either her making or early childhood’s grooming, these pockets came with more fierce rapidity. Surely there were other people that felt the same way about the same sort of things! In such a large city, she could not be the only one, or at least she hoped. The people watching was a band-aid to a gash, assuaging the pain only in so much as it stopped her bleeding out.

                The chowder shop was only one of her preferred venues, it was often full of people speaking other languages and let her sometimes imagine that she was in some village near Hogwarts with the frequency of people dressed in odd costumes and foreign demeanors that seemed so magical. Another haunt of hers was the coffee-shop she loved, just on the edge of the Tenderloin. It made her feel that she was living a tad more dangerously, even if the only danger was that one of the homeless men that sometimes sat on the stoops as she walked in to the shop would be slightly more drunk than usual and call out to her. As she sat there, she would people watch, but due to there being less people walking, and thus less rhythms to measure, she would play card games on her computer, the suit played depending on the gender of the person walking in to the shop or by it.

                Sometimes she thought of things from her songs, like wishing the Beatles would “look at all the lonely people” like they did in Eleanor Rigby and find her among them in a special verse. Perhaps then others would take note, and she would not end up “darning her socks in the night when there’s nobody there.” But what does she care. Most of the British boys who passed her on the wharf or in the street didn’t have the compassion of John, George, Paul, and Ringo. If they did, the world would definitely be a kinder place.

                Occasionally it was Jakob Dylan’s crooning with the Wallflowers that God Don’t Make Lonely Girls that made her scoff. Not only was the boy in love with a stripper--who may have been lonely, but surely had plenty of company--he was not going to fix her loneliness; he’d be back with Josephine from the track before in no time. But such thinking was just depressing. She’d sooner try to pretend she was part of the book club that sat near her on a Tuesday at the coffee shop. She was as well read as they were, probably more so. A Picture of Dorian Gray was something she could relate to, a person who on the outside appeared together, but whose secret self was something far distant from anything a passer-by might think.

thoughts i thought in myanmar

In a second I was 

Over the pacific

Lights of the city behind

San Francisco 

Love of mine

Lost in the foggy black sky

-----

I looked out the window of this giant bird

And stars hung stately, strung in space

My heart contracts and breaths grow short

And tears Unwilled appear

Beauty begins to stop my heart

I, creation, fly with stars

----

The skies are dim with the promise of dawn

But the lights down below show the journey's begun

-----

The land below, the clouds above

Above the clouds a mountain range

It rises blue through lighter blue

And breaks the cloud's cool coat

-----

Fields of mirror plates showing the sky

Rivers like boas that ate too much food

Snaking the curves til they meet in the sea

Road and pagodas and water and trees

-----

Fires of spires 

Breaking the sky

Mirrored monastics 

Are walking on by

Ancient and neon

Mixing in light 

the age of the Buddha

And time of the night

----

slip slip slipping

Fish fish flopping

Kid kid screaming

Splash splash splashing

Fish market teeming

Like a school of fish

----

Place of robes but not of light

Children running through that night

"Mai Savannah", My Savannah

Claimed by children as their own

Love and laughter finding me

Dearest moment, duty free

----

Serendipitous Internet

Instagram views

Breezes from engines

And Lin-Lin shines too

----

I've known this grace of which you speak

It's deeper far than any sea

A love, a light, a comfort rare,

My greatest sorrow all He bears

----

Rivers on land like lines on my hand

Crooked and snaking and crosshatched with trees

Yangon and Mandalay, Inle, Bagan

Journey adventure, an airplane's eye view

---

The biggest injustice is grace for our sins. 

The greatest mercy mission was Christ  coming down.

-----

Learn to cry for the sins of the world

Have faith that His light can conquer every darkness

Pray for the ones who can not see

There's only one who never fails

----

Sunflower turn their faces to the sun,

You turn your faces away from your gods 

When bowing down to worship

But I, I stand before my king

And gaze at his beautiful glory

My eyes are opened

My heart is full

You transform me

And make me pure

----

How will we ever reach the ground

How will we ever land this bird

Our wings are so big and the earth is so small

We're soaring, cloud-sized, won't come down

----

Orange flowers orange earth

Orange feet from orange dirt

Bands of green and patchy creams

Azure sky and buffalo tracks

----

Water tracks and almost home

Sun kissed feet and joy in heart

Herons flying overhead

Hyacinth along the way

----

Heart in hand and eyes alight

Paper airplane hand tattoos

Flying round the sky and room

Dancing through the clouds and life

Loving, laughing, finding joy

Living out my days for Him

Going into all the earth

Fin.

By me 2 years ago

Lord I don't wanna be here all alone
So storm my heart and make me your own
Here I stand in my transgressions and sins
All evil thoughts and no good within
But I fell down, Jesus, in front of your tree
Prayed for your mercy and you set me free
And your freedonm comes in my deepest storm
I get tossed and pulled and the waves crash down
But you've loved me first and you won't let go

Memories

To drive down a road one used to take is an experience altogether singular. Whether in sunlight or darkness, the memories of the road and what it led to at times are fully lucid, or at least the picture they call to mind is.

Memories of children abandoned find me today, of their faces, defensive but hoping for love, like the children that most of us are. Actually I can barely remember their faces, or even their names. I can remember the name of a holocaust survivor, but not the names of six children surviving their own holocaust. All i remember is the dark road to the house that took them in, their fits of violence and  of violent love, the stories I told them and their refusal to go to sleep. I told them stories of soldiers to make them behave; of our nation's brave who obey and are strong.

I gave them love to make them strong, but in the end I don't know what happened to them. I pray that those short few months are still a distant memory to them, that people that loved them and prayed with them and gave them stories of soldiers will not fade too far from their hearts. But most of all for them I want hope and peace and love, like that I've found with Christ, and that which I tried to give them.