The God of New

“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” –Isaiah 43:18-19

The Earth’s Baptism

That morning the rain started lightly,

coalescing in the pre-dawn, murmuring

where wind once adorned air;

slowly it coiled like a river snake,

soft and intangible.

The rain gathered itself among crackling reeds,

bent low to smell, to taste unseasoned earth

that would become the tomb of a beloved child.

The rain wrapped around and around,

a tear-woven shroud,

tenderly, to conceal what had already died

and begun to decay in the still darkness.

Unraveling in grief,

it wept for its now-muffled loss,

and did not breathe for forty days

until at last the rain gasped,

surprised by light that reached inside the tomb

and showed walls untouched by sorrow.

Hope tempered despair

and the rain changed then,

never again to consume all.

It's about us

I sat down to write a blog post today not knowing where my keyboard would take me. Whenever I do this I always hope, somehow, that whatever I’m randomly inspired to write on a given day will be some funny anecdote from my life that makes me seem adventurous and pithy.

I don’t know why that is, really. Maybe it’s because I love stories. I’ve always held a mixture of admiration and envy for those specially gifted people who can simply make up grand tales of heroism and romance out of what seems to be thin air. When I re-read Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, it is the character of the traveling bard that continuously intrigues me.

He lives a life apart from the world, burdened by the truth. Truth that he disguises in layers of legend, because his audience—both heroes and villains—don’t want to know they’re actually being told how to live their lives. The bard always has something to say, and people listen to him when they don’t want to listen to anyone else.

When I think about it, it’s no wonder that as a child, I fought the occasional impulse to steal a loaf of bread from my parents’ house before striking out on my own to become a hobo. The glamor of the bard’s nomadic, ponderous life, his deep wisdom, masked by fiction—it’s exactly the kind of romantic notion that has fascinated me since my childhood.

Because that’s what people want in a story, isn’t it? Humans like to be shown, not told. All at once we feel a desperate need for guidance, for inspiration—yet stubbornly cling to our independence. And every story that we fall in love with seems to be, in some way, about us—just with more exotic names, and if it’s a good story, a little more magic.

But in any of its forms, a story is simply a vehicle for us to step into another dimension and thereby see our own reality more clearly.