Lamentations for Today

This is a collection of laments I wrote for a worship service I led with a friend in my church. Modern worship is a bit too positive sometimes, but biblical worship makes room for disappointment, frustration, and mourning. Modern worship usually praises the singer as much as the Sung To, while these laments—written topically for those things that get us down —remind us that He’s God, we’re not, and that’s okay. Really, it’s okay. Even when it totally is not okay, it’s still okay. Or it’s going to be. The ship may totally go down with all of us on it, but it will still be okay. Okay?

ABUSE OF POWER
When those enthroned usurp
Sanctity from those in their care
And when the lowly seek status
In yet more enthroning –
Lord, have mercy on us.

THE AGE OF DISTRACTION
When deep-rooted wisdom is pruned by short-cutted data,
When the senses are dulled by the sensual,
When Creation is blurred by the created
And the created grow bored with Creation –
Lord, have mercy on us.

UNRESOLVED HOPE / UNANSWERED PRAYER
When we listen in chambers of silence,
When we search through tunnels that grow,
When we hope against nature, believe against science,
And stand firm in the face of a daunting approach –
Lord, have mercy on us.

BREVITY OF LIFE
When we count our days like apples
Dropping from the brittle branches of drought,
When a child goes with more unrealized tomorrows
Than remembered yesterdays,
When our bodies no longer carry or recall
Or agree to nourish our weight –
Lord, have mercy on us.

LACK OF PROVISION
When the cupboards we maintenance
Are as bare as brand new,
When the fields we tend
Yield nothing or less,
When a paycheck is the substance
Of things hoped and unheld –
Lord, have mercy on us.

APATHY
When I simply cannot be asked,
When tragedy holds harmony with gossip,
When I prefer screens to windows, sleek skin to whole hearts,
Pabst Blue Ribbon and pumpkin spice
To pouring out spirit or providing sanctuary,
When the nation, the state, the city, my people
Can all go blank-verb themselves –
Lord, have mercy on us.

IN ANXIETY / DESPAIR / DEPRESSION
When sleep beyond rest,
When obscurity be my bed,
When the locust devours my ties to the truth
And when I open the window for his return –
Lord, have mercy on us.

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Inspiration for Another Day

You do not have to write an entire book all in one day. You do not have to get every word right the first time you plunk the little keys that put the letters that make a sentence on the screen. You do not have to finish a whole page. You do not have to have sunshine, or feel tranquil, or even brush your teeth. The laundry can wait, the dishes can wait, and your stomach will not start to feel better until after you sit down at your desk. You know all these things, already. You’re just stubborn, and whiny, and anxious; and you like your sentences to be built on multiples of three.

Or maybe you’re the kind of writer who wants to have a shiny new book, yet doesn’t want to do all the work it takes to have a shiny new book. Or maybe you’re not opposed to the work, you just don’t know where to begin. You have so many ideas and it’s hard to commit to just one thing, so you get inside your head and imagine all the things that could go wrong with your first chapter, or the narrative arc, or your tendency to only come up with three items in a list before moving on to the next topic.

Because maybe you don’t have what it takes for the long haul. Maybe your attention span is too short, or your ideas are too shallow, or you just don’t want to find out what happens when you write a whole book that nobody wants to read. Or buy. Or publish. So, why bother with the work in the first place?

After all, you’re feeling kind of hungry now, and you’ve already made it halfway through the page. In fact, this is probably the three hundred word mark, right here. Close. 298. (Dang. This is harder than it looks.)

So, now what? This is usually where a good idea first starts to show its face, but you’ll have to keep ignoring that churning in your stomach, and now your fingers are starting to shake, too. Ah, what the heck! Go eat a bowl of cereal; nobody’s going to read this post anyway. Because there’s no point to it. It’s just a bunch of gibberish you came up with to make yourself do the thing, hit the keys, and fill up the blank space looking back at you. What good will it do anyone to see what it’s really like when you get started with a new project?

But then again, maybe you’ll have a change of heart after you eat that bowl of cereal. Maybe low blood sugar was your real enemy all along. That and being so cold that you had to warm up your tea for the third time this morning. So what if you spilled it when you opened the microwave and cursed loud enough for the dog to wake up from her nap? That’s beside the point, because now you’ve remembered the other people out there trying to get their work done today. The other writers who might need reminding that this real life is the only place we have to get our work done.

Though we often wish it would, the real work doesn’t happen at writers’ conferences, or in daydreams, or overlooking a small villa at the beach. Well, not for anyone other than James Patterson.

For the rest of us, the work happens at our kitchen tables—with dirty dishes in the sink and unfolded laundry on the couch. Whether the weather is great or terrible. It happens when we push through the doubt and anxiety and fear of failure that plague each one of us. It happens when we tap that first key, and decide what word will come next. It happens with faith, perseverance, and surrender—just like the rest of life. And like lots of other good, good things; sometimes it happens best, a little at a time.

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Bottled Emotions

(On the Anniversary of My Mother’s Death)

When I turned seven my mother began
explaining the colors. Took the bottle
down from the medicine cabinet, emptied
it out on a white glass plate, rummaged
around for reading glasses and then
picked out a pale green jelly bean.

This is laughter, she said, this is the milk
inside your popcorn, the old-fashioned
elevators floating your stomach, the suck
of white water that swallows your oars and
the pinch of new skates just a half size too
small, the night you’re introduced to the ice.

This is the flicker of vanilla flame when electricity’s
out, this is your first and second and 22nd time
wrecking your snowboard, this is your half-breed
husky chasing invisible squirrels in his sleep and
this is the slap of your deposit forfeited when
the landlord discovers spray painted galaxies
on the bedroom ceiling. She gave it to me and it
tasted like Sunkist lime, which felt right.

On my eighth birthday I ate bright yellow
piña colada and she told me it was loneliness,
extra twenties in your wallet and sunny
afternoons in the park with too perfectly
trained pets, plus an unexpected afternoon
off spent ordering only one drink.

At nine I tasted danger as strawberry jam;
wasn’t much good at math but I counted
the rest, found there were sixty-six colors to go
and decided my mother had started too late.

Since then I’ve known ennui and anger and
ease and the feeling you get when you stare
mesmerized at the shapes the cream clouds
in your coffee are making and think about
all of the places that flicker over the airport’s
departure time screens, cities of strangers
still not expecting you to come.

Some years I wrote some of them down –
how ecstasy smarts like new blood in your
bedsheets, how trust is like wild geese
winging through mist, how the feeling of
missing the bus in time for the first snowfall
of the year goes down like cream soda.

But there are so many colors and not enough
birthdays. When I left home there were still
fifty-seven jelly beans in the bottle, fifty-seven
unfamiliar flavors floating out there for me
to run into, not knowing how to recognize them,
not having anyone to teach me their tastes. I wish
you could have stayed I wish I could have stayed
longer I think maybe I would have been better.

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A Castle On a Hill: an Interview with Jacob Stock

For several years now, Jacob and Melissa Stock have been running a delightful, slightly otherworldly retreat center in Strawberry Plains, Tennessee. The architectural centerpiece of this place is the Stocks’ house, which is a castle. No, really. They also have a love for the Oxford Inklings, creative community in general, and for the Church at large. Jacob was kind enough to sit down and answer a few of our questions. We’re excited to introduce you to the work of Castle Ministries.

Foundling House: It’s obvious that, somewhere along the way, you discovered this need to get away from the busy-ness of daily life for a season. What’s the story behind that?

Jacob Stock: My wife and I discussed TV when we first got married and decided to watch one show a week. We eventually gave up on even that, because of content really. So after a year with no TV and maybe four to six movies, we just experienced such a relief and peace from not being inundated by the world. It was through this—and maybe a trip to Canada—that we stumbled into an experience that we wanted to try to encourage, even if for a week or a weekend. It is hard to step away from what I now call the “noise”—noise being all things that grab for our attention and rush at us.

FH: At the heart of Castle Ministries, it should be noted: there is a castle. Tell us about this place.

JS: It is really a house with stone siding and a tower. The hope was to have an icon or marketing tool, but also to mimic more of a monastery with simple beauty. It would just be harder to convince folks to go away to the monastery with all the connotations that involves. We have simply used the building to express a desire to be different, to come away from the normal.  And kids love it, so I do gain campers as a result of its slick market appeal. We are not a very high end venue, so it is humble and all that we do is geared to be accessible to most demographic and economic levels. Beauty and Goodness are high values we place on space and quite a lost art in my opinion. Art and Architecture had such an effect on past generations of the church, and this is in some way a connection can be made to that old tradition.

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The Other Endgame

First things first: spoiler alert. This is going to get messy, because I got messy.

I got the last good seat at the 9:30 showing of Avengers: Endgame—the only seat left from which I wouldn’t have to crane my neck at an obtuse angle. I shuffled in to the row, which was mostly empty at that point, except for the dating couple next to my seat. I apologized before plopping down beside the lady, which made the moment more awkward than it would have been anyway. A little while later, a large man and his young son scooted past us and sat next to me. These were to be my companions for the journey. We had come for entertainment, yes, but also for closure. After twenty-one films of waiting for post-credits questions, we demanded answers.

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What is Meant by the Land

When an old woman says it, the plot of black earth
    where love has unfurled
like the fiery feathers of the celosia, busting wet like
        the pepper-bells,
spilling light like the husks that hold the yellow pearls.
She has cupped it in her hands like a baby, she has fed
        all her babies on it;
they eat of its unfading colors and are unfading in their
        turn.

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My First Mother’s Day

I remember when my best friend told me her mother didn’t want her kids to observe Mother’s Day. This was a family at my childhood church and, for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why a woman so like my own mother disapproved of a day whose purpose was to thank and honor her. My friend said that her mother thought children should honor their mothers every day, not just on a day exploited to sell cards and flowers. I couldn’t disagree with this. But I also couldn’t see a problem with also having a special day to show my own mom honor and gratitude for how wonderful she was.

Since my daughter’s recent birth (a month and a half ago), I see this from a new perspective. Not that I’m ready to cancel Mother’s Day celebrations, but I’m also not so confident in my new role as mom that I’m eager to have a day celebrating my motherhood.

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