I have heard it said many times over the years that to be good writer you have to be a good reader and have read lots of books.

According to Mary Oliver in A Poetry Handbook it seems the opposite is true for poets: “Everyone knows that poets are born and not made in school. This is true of painters, sculptors, and musicians. Something that is essential can’t be taught; it can only be given, or earned, or formulated in a manner too mysterious to be picked apart and redesigned for the next person.”

Every story needs a beginning, and for today, this is mine.

What I have found true for my self and my wife over the past decade or two is that, at least for us, it is much easier to enter through a door we believe is being opened to us, than it is to walk through that same door when it seems to be closing.

To illustrate this point, I will reference our experience in a local church that we were a part of for over 20 years. By and large, the experience that we had during the first ten years was mostly positive. We were a community of people working together, having babies together and fellowshipping in and around the formal Sunday meetings. That the leadership style was more or less “top down” and performance based didn’t stop us from being a big family, even though there were structural deficiencies in how the working out of the gospel was presented to us.

I have said that in order to say this: towards the last part of our participation (maybe two or three years) the church became embroiled in disputes over leaders, leadership styles and stuff happened that should not have taken place. Sandi and I saw the door being closed and stayed around, to our eventual harm, much too long.

After we left that church (more like released from eldership) we bounced around and tried out a few churches before becoming involved in one that closed its doors sometime last summer, 2023. Our experience at that church was similar to the one before: an open door, feel at home, time passes (maybe 8 years) and things began to feel a little bit strange. I can’t remember all the times Sandi and I would talk about our concerns but were not able, for some unfathomable reason, to walk out through the door that we felt had originally been opened to us by God.

As to being a writer or a poet I have this to say: I love it when the words that frame the thoughts I am having find their way to the page; more so in prose than in poetry.

I am writing this, to some degree, in order to share a poem I wrote on 6/23/2016 and perhaps during, or just before, my time at the second church experience I have mentioned. In sharing this poem, I want to juxtapose that place, with the place that I find myself today, in a small community church where I have grown more in the last three months than I grew in the 8 plus years before.

6/23/2016

There are feelings and thoughts
that grab my mind for a moment
and then fade away,
unarticulated – they linger just long enough
to inflict their pain.

As I see and feel that my life has not gone
in the direction these thoughts suggest
I vow to plumb the depths
of these brief encounters.

Last night
As I looked at one of my bookcases
filled with poetry and stories
I felt the loss of something
I can’t readily explain: the sadness that accompanies
these momentary glimpses into my torn phyche.

I have kept that little scrap of paper around for a long time and never felt the unction to share it.
It’s somewhat bleak but indeed a poetic moment that I passed through.

I am happy that I am not in that place anymore and feel equally blessed to be where I am at today.

I still wonder why it is that we stick around something or somewhere that we truly believe is over in what I call God’s timing, and has ceased being beneficial to our emotional or physical health.

Last week I helped move a family from our church group, from a thousand square foot house to a two thousand square foot house next door. The difference I saw, for a family of six, is simply amazing and speaks to the fact that God is for us and not against us and His timing is His timing and sometimes not easily understood.