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A poem based on Psalm 142

Tossing restlessly, sleeping fitfully, I was annoyed with myself. Setting aside the annoyance of trying to force sleep (which only makes it worse), I realized the root cause was fear. I was feeling anxious about a future event. Lord, give me a verse to remind me of the Truth and He did: "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." (I couldn’t remember the address for this amazing verse in the middle of the night, but in the morning, I looked it up -- 2 Timothy 1:7).

“Why are you crying?” My husband’s voice echoes in my mind from earlier in the day. I ask myself the question over and over. I try to answer it, but no response seems to suffice. A body knows when a heart is aching, when it’s fragile and needs to be tended to. Even if the mind can’t quite express it, the body was designed to read the room of the soul.

One Church. A healthy, strong body. This is more than a unity or an alignment of beliefs; it is beautifully living as one interconnected unit. Joined together by joints and sinews. The metaphor of the body as One Church is meant to signify a wholistic connectedness through Christ for our good and His glory. The challenge – why it is so hard for a group of people to form a single body -- is that true connectedness is hard. It requires a continual, ongoing, sacrificial investment by giving to others the one resource most of us in our flesh guard the most – our time.

I notice in the scene of the cross that John mentions just a handful of people who are there observing the gruesome death of this man called Jesus. I read of four soldiers who strip the clothes off His back and cast lots to see who gets what. I read of Mary the mother of Jesus and her sister. I imagine grieving with my own sister if either of us were to lose one of our boys.