Life is a Poem - Rose McCormick Brandn

If you build your life on my words, said Jesus, you will be like a house built on a rock. When rains pour and rivers flood, your house won’t collapse. (My paraphrase of Matthew 7:24)

The Greek word Jesus used for the idea of building a life on His word is poieo. The English word poem comes from this word. Poets use words in creative ways to build something original.
“Be a poet,” Jesus is saying. “Take my words and build a life with them.” His words build solid foundations. His words can decorate our lives and turn them into something beautiful.
Recently, I met a pretty mother of two small children. She told how she’d been addicted to heroine, sold her body on the downtown streets and lived in constant rage. I looked into her clear eyes and soft face. I couldn’t picture her slashing her arms, screaming out for help. One rainy night, in the grizzly downtown core, she went berserk. She felt like she was in hell.
Foolishly, she’d built her life on a sand bar. A hurricane had rushed in from the sea and flattened her life. In the middle of her destruction, she remembered that God loved her.
That night this young woman began to build a meaningful life, a poem, because, as Corrie ten Boom often said, “No darkness is so deep that Jesus is not deeper still.”
As long as there’s breath, it’s never too late for God to take the meaningless jumble of our lives and turn them into a beautiful poem.
Build your life on the solid foundation of Christ’s words. 

“One well-chosen word at a time. One stanza of service at a time. And with our words and deeds, we can leave something beautiful behind in the lives of others.”  Eugene H. Peterson.

 

Rose McCormick Brandon writes personal experience, faith, life stories and the stories of Canada's child immigrants. She is married to Doug and lives in Caledonia, Ontario.

Visit her blogs: The Promise of Home (http:littleimmigrants.wordpress.com) and Listening to My Hair Grow (http:rosemccormickbrandon.wordpress.com). Contact address: rosembrandon@yahoo.ca. 

 

Her latest book, One Good Word Makes all the Difference is available here.

Looking forward to spring --Carolyn Wilker

 Today the snow falls again, lazy flakes that blow this way and that on their way to the ground, coating the road once again and covering the rooftops of the houses. From my office window, I see the ceramic birdhouse swinging from the eaves of the workshop, in tune with in the wind.

I ache for spring to arrive, for the snow to melt, for the first plant shoots to emerge from the ground. I’m tired of winter, though a bright sunny day in January or February, with fresh snow on the trees and ground, looks quite lovely.

Even as I write, the wind picks up and blows the snow across the yard before it clears again. If the groundhog really were a determiner of when winter ends, he is surely wrong this year. Perhaps it is that I’m tired of the cold, ready to shed winter boots and heavy coats, ready for warmth, and to put away snow shovels. Besides, the calendar says it’s spring, even if it doesn’t look like spring outdoors here yet.

 I look forward to seeing the first flower stems emerge from the ground and standing with my neighbours outdoors chatting. Except for shovelling snow, going outdoors to start up their cars and going to work, so many of them have stayed in their homes all winter. In spring, the snowbirds return too—those folks who flee to Florida for the winter months.

Solomon wrote, “Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.”  He understood the reawakening that comes at this time of year, even if he’d never experience cold like our Canadian winter.

Spring has always been my favourite time of year, when creation is so full of promise. It’s entirely appropriate that Easter falls in the early spring. If winter is associated with sorrow, then cannot spring associate itself with rebirth and … spring fever? The kind that gets us out of our homes and in the open more freely, the time when children get out their skipping ropes and ball gloves and enjoy the sunshine on their faces. The time for adults to also feel a new spring in their step, and in tune with nature.

 Spring is coming soon, I just know it, and I’ll be ready.

Carolyn Wilker, author, editor and storyteller
www.carolynwilker.ca

 

Allegory of a Nest - Smith Meyer

It’s just an empty nest in a maple tree that has been visible all winter. Occasionally it was mounded with freshly fallen snow, sometimes coated with freezing rain—cold and uninviting. That vacant nest signified fledglings now matured and flown. The haven of possibility now barren.

The scene bore a marked resemblance to the writing area of my mind. My latest fledgling grown, matured and in print, the creative nest sitting cold and bare for several months now. Oh, the winter activity blustered and blew around it. The death of my brother, my cousin and three other close acquaintances just amplified the barrenness of this season in my life and the stark emptiness of the nest that once cradled creativity. The frigid snow attempted to cover and beautify it, but no life stirred inside.

Then came the warm days of last week—the pungent aromas of spring in the air, the snow melting like a piece of chocolate on the warm tongue of the sun-drenched earth, the first tips of daffodils peeking through the mulch in the flowerbed. They reminded me of the recent day I spoke to a group of precious women eager to learn and stretch their boundaries. Two came afterward to tell me how they had grown in self-understanding through reading my books. That affirmation, like the sun with the daffodils, pushed the pregnant bulb of creativity within me to stretch toward the light.

From the daffodils, my eyes travelled upward to the maple. The still-bare branches continued to support that same nest, but something was different. In my mind, instead of emptiness, I saw great potential—almost as if the nest was sporting a sign “Available for Immediate Occupancy.” That nest and my mind seemed suddenly to be wide open to new possibilities. The winter has ended My heart is filled with longing to once more hatch ideas that stir within me—the desire to see a whole new nest full of inspirational stories and writing is waiting to be given wings.

New Life

A very recent loss in my life left me asking a lot of questions and seeking some guidance. At the same time, I'd been thinking ahead to Easter and the material I want to include in the April issue of my church's monthly newsletter, which got me reflecting on resurrection...

The idea of "new life" is probably a common theme for churches around this time of year, especially as spring is around the corner (though you wouldn't know it for the frigid temperatures in Montreal today!) Buds on trees, tiny blooms, butterflies emerging from cocoons... these are metaphors we've heard again and again in sermons about salvation and resurrection. For Christians, physical death is not frightening because we have the hope of eternal life in heaven. And for a new believer, "dying to self" is a sacrifice eagerly made because of the promise of salvation and a new life in Christ.

As powerful as these truths are, we can easily take them for granted as clichés. For me, however, they have a new significance, at least at this stage in my life. I can either mourn the closing of one chapter of my story and shroud my heart in black, or I can anticipate the beginning of the next chapter and rejoice in knowing that God will "make all things new."

If I can believe that Jesus raised Himself from the dead, and if I have experienced new life as a born-again Christian, then how can I doubt that God will take any pain or loss or burden that I bring to Him and turn that into an opportunity for change and newness and blessing?

For you, it may be the loss of a job, the rejection of a manuscript, separation from a loved one, a move to an unfamiliar city, or some other disappointment. It's normal to feel like your dream -- or a part of you -- has died. I believe it's okay to feel grief, just as Jesus' disciples must have wept after His death, but today I also feel like I can encourage you to trust God to give you new life. Nothing can be so dead that it is beyond His power to resurrect!