WAITING- A WOULD-BE POEM

For years a poem has been residing restlessly on the tip of my tongue.  Now, that is an odd thing for one like me, whose tongue has trouble holding onto anything that gets near it!  But for some reason, this poem, unlike hundreds of others that have spewed out ink all over white pages, just stays there in progress, unformed and waiting.  I don’t believe it is that I am not ready to say the thing or that the thing I want to say is not clearly established in my mind.  It just has never jelled into poetry yet.  It has occurred to me recently that this is no excuse for not saying it.  So here is the poem, in less than poetic delivery, that has been sitting on my back burner for so long.

Lord, we are all just waiting.  We act like we are busy with important things down here, but what we are really the busiest with is the waiting.  We want you to come back.  I know you expect us to be about the business of getting others ready for you, and I sure hope I am doing that.  I pray every morning to be vigilant about my opportunities for the day ahead, to be ready for “Yes” when the question comes up, and to resist “No” when I get goal-oriented about my own agenda.  But, God, honestly, so much of the time, I notice that what I am really doing is throwing myself into diversions, casting my energy toward some kind of distraction to make me not sigh that You’re still not back. 

Here we are down here planning meals, doing the laundry, doing spring cleaning, organizing our desk drawers.  We are going learning to use our new cameras, building tree houses, taking hikes, playing golf and bridge, and vacuuming our floors.  We are moving out of old houses into new ones, and buying new cars, and looking for the right college.  We are crocheting afghans and subscribing to magazines, learning to make perfect piecrust, and teaching our grandchildren to pitch washers and catch fish.  We plan, we go, we do… but mostly, we know that we are waiting.  We look upon the world you have left us in and glean its treasures and exult in its pleasures, but we yawn at night when we climb into bed knowing that it was a  fragment of only relative finery, a titillating diversion, a consolation prize while we wait for Life to begin.

Oh, it’s not that we don’t enjoy ourselves, Lord, and I certainly don’t mean to sound ungrateful for brown eggs discovered under red chickens and a largemouth bass wriggling and tugging but losing the battle on the end of my line. None of that elegance is lost on me.  All the ways you have given me to be re-created are utterly delightful in light of the frame of fallen-ness that seeks to swallow me whole.   The Prince of this World, the Enemy, prowls these parts, no matter where we find ourselves on this fragile orb. So, that we have such pleasures as reading a good book and listening to rapturous music, touching babies’ faces, and smelling paperwhites that make surprise visits out of the bleak, cold January brownness is no insignificant offering.  We accept them with humble gratitude and stuff our pockets full of them for rainy days ahead.

But all the while, we are really just finding something to do, some way to get by, ways to forget we are still on this side until You show up and we get to go Home. 

Am I doing it wrong?  Did You want me to put this down in some concrete, tangible form so that I would see something wrong in my viewpoint?  If I were really being used up for the right purposes, would I be less than eager for Your return, knowing every night when I finally lie down for a few hours, that there is still so much yet to be done?

 Instead of a would-be poem from me to You, is this really a letter from You to me?  Could the reason that I have never written the poem be that I am ashamed?