Red Sea

a poem

Tell me about a time when God
parted the Red Sea in your life,
sending fish and krill crashing
through the waves of your
unbelief.

Let’s build a fire around
these stories - the miracles
we have seen - along with the
lonely moments when we
understood God

was still there in the vibrating
silence. What if we could receive
our ashes on more than just
one Wednesday a year?
What if

we are really made of the stuff of
Adam, and receive them any time we
witness a dust devil stirred up in the
middle of some old, prairie road?
What if

we can remember our dirt frame, our
finite nature, and the person and work
of Jesus, every time - dare I say - a child
eats a powdered donut, and laughs?
Restore

unto us, O God. Restore unto us joy
in clunky, aged hymns, newfangled
worship songs, and in braving the
snow just to get to church. Let us
hold hands

with faithfulness, developing a zeal
for Folgers coffee and conversations
that don’t come naturally. Would that
we could tackle the dishes in the sink,
read

our children Bedtime for Francis four
times in a row, bring our neighbor bread,
and attend to prayer and contemplation
with the same holy fervor, knowing that
worship

can happen on our knees at the altar
and on our knees while scrubbing the
toilet. My miracle is that I found you,
O Church, at a young age, and you
continue

on, with hem-clenching faith, though
often battered, and rightly ashamed of
false gods and moral failings, we are holy
hypocrites, a repentant cloud of witnesses,
walking

across miraculously dry land, just in
time to see the waves crashing back
again. We set up camp, light a fire,
lay our burdens down, and finally
rest

knowing that Home is on the way,
and these stories will soon become our
history, the map we showed our children
so that they would put their trust
in God.