For Tyler and for Erin--to remind them that we are shaped by our obstacles.

The Line and the Branch

We love a line.

We love its decisiveness, 

its directness. 

We love its clean predictability,

its efficiency

its elegant simplicity.

We stack a thousand messy efforts

to find a bottom line, a plot line, a time line.

We stripe our fields and fence our ground.

We read our own brambly stories

into lines upon our palms.

Because, you see,

a line is the symbol of control.

and so

We pin our God to crossed lines

The God who was never the lover of a line.

But rather He 

who instead 

prefers the branch--

in river delta, in synapse, in leaf, 

in artery, in lightening bolt, in crack.

All things branchy bear His Almighty thumbprint 

in their tangle of thwarts and twists

and opportunistic spurts.

The branch--

the structure of agency and choice,

of generation and providence. 

Energy dodging round obstacles, 

sprawling through ease  

and finding at last, its windy way home, 

ministering as it makes its path.

He, the lover of the branch,

Draws no pickety line round our days.

  nor does he knot them together 

like a string of pearls, 

or cue them up before His grace--

but rather He casts them wide

on the vast and brutal plane

and trusts the hunger 

of the wormy root,

the zeal of the bud.

And so we are unfettered, 

yet bidden--

“Here is sun--turn to it

Here is water--yearn for it

Here is manna scattered 

like seed in storm

                    find it.

Come.”