Stopping for a moment, resting my weary eyes and feet, I take look around, take assessment of what I see. And to my cleverly forged fright, like at a surprise birthday party, when I already know what’s going down, because I notice a shirt tail from behind the couch; I convince myself to be shocked by the barren situation of my life. I pretend to not feel the burning candle heat upon my face based on the number of years I have been wandering. I feign ignorance at what a mirage is, continuing to eat arid cake and drink bitter beer.
But worst of all I uphold the lie coursing inside my veins, telling me it’s normal for depression and anxiety to flow inside like a fiery lava stream, bringing with it the onslaught ashes of dead dreams and lost years, of blurred certainties that have shaken for so long that my eyes have adjusted to them as normality.
It is here, in this single slice of temporal time that eternity is settled. I know that if I stop for too long, I will not be able to preserve the pretense, to sustain my sanity. And so, I make the decision to avert my eyes, to elevate cognitive lies, to rush headlong in a northerly direction told by a bi-polar compass in order to at least feel the wind against my face. To try and separate myself from the stench of lingering and laughable happiness, sung using the words, but in a melancholic melodic rhythm, like a bell tolling; making for me a gallows call.
It is here in my crying calculation and my murmuring measurement that out of the corner of my eye I see a tree. I see a tree! Suspecting at first another illusion of my ongoing delusion I almost miss it, like little blink-towns on this road-trip we call life. But someone…some…thing, a divine leniency, a holy pity, an authentic humanity, pressed the pause button on this movie we call life. And even though time stands still, I am able to come forward. To take a step in a direction on a road I have never been, towards a destination I do not yet know and with an unspeakable feeling.
It is here, when the corner becomes the center, when my eyes are lifted up instead of focused on the ground beneath my feet, when I turn away from introspection and look away to this tree, that I see it cast into my bitter situation, making my life sweeter than the DNA inkling strands of a honey bee, a sugary sample of a new reality.
And yet, even when I pitch my tent, finally beating the heat, a vexing air bubble boils up and pops a word – deceit. For still within the concrete streets, where my mind and heart beat, I have to face an awful truth, that the within the borders of my bowels I’m still suffering ulcer defeats.
And it is here, in my bed of scared retreat, with up to my eyes high pulled sheets, that I peer over towards an uplifted serpent pole tree; that just by looking at it seems to quench the burning fire snaking inside of me. That just by uplifting it infuses love into me.
It is here that I hear a voice saying come here my bride to be, I am your bridegroom and will show you a holy city. Look up again, uplift your chin, until our eyes do meet and inside those wood walls that so easily burn, I’ll petrify, until your jasper stone complete.
It is here, to everyone who believes, to everyone who uplifts their eyes, the bronze serpent to see; and uplifting their eyes upon Him, looking away into His face, He turns serpentine sinners into sons saved through mercy and grace. And through this beholding and reflecting like mirrored glass; able to detect disorder decrease.
For God so loved the world, He put His Son upon a tree, cursing and condemning Him, so that you and I could be free.
COMING FORWARD 