For Lent – Meditation I – An Inkling, Too

If a picture is worth a thousand words then this one is priceless. Our son’s French bulldog, Cedar, expectantly waiting for a cookie perfectly illustrates the Psalmist’s thought in Psalms 123:2 when he says: “As the eyes of servants  look to the hand of their master,as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress,so our eyes look to the Lord our God, until he has mercy upon us.“

And in Psalm 62:4 David says, “My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him alone.”

If you are one of Clive’s Pilgrims, like I am, then the waiting demands that we, like Cedar, look up for our expectations and hope.

I’m not talking about the kind of mundane waiting we do at red lights, or in check-out lines, or in doctor’s offices. I’m talking about waiting for the Dawn after the Crucifixion—the Daybreak when the shadows flee and the darkness will be made light.

The Apostle John puts it this way in Revelations 21:4, “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

Here is my most recent poem in which I share my thoughts about Waiting. I hope you will find something in it that speaks to you in your time of Waiting.

An Inkling, Too       

Shaft light shards
pierce thru blackness
borne of dim memory
as daybreak —
orange, red, crimson
blends,
bleeds thru grey canvas,
creeps up the horizon;
a complex kaleidoscope:
dispelling yet casting shadows —
emerging dawn
within my foggy mind.

Glimpses of radiant glory,
shooting stars,
fireworks,
mixed with
griefs observed ,
losses internalized.

The shadows linger
even as the sun also rises.

Hints of what might have been
precisely measured
mingle what is
into what is to be.

Foretastes of heaven’s future ecstasy,
shot straight thru
with the silver bullet
of today’s pain.

So, archeologist-like,
I ponder the emerging sun-blaze
as it turns darkness into light
and begin to sift through the sandy dirt
     forms of the bittersweet days of my life
     hoping the Strainers will capture
esoteric meanings among fragments
     of the world beyond my rubble of
     broken bone, wood, glass, metal, leather,
     and clothes bearing dried blood and tears.

Using tweezers to grasp at unfamiliar, microscopic
bits of my moments and my days,
angling them right, left, upside, downside
I leave no blade of grass unturned.

Desperate to read between the lines:
to align the crooked jigsaw puzzle pieces
until they link the incongruous,
unanswerable forms together
with unexpected precision.

Soon I become tired and sick of trying.

Lifting my gaze once more heaven-ward
breathing in the crystal bright morning air
I watch the bits and pieces of my life tangles
rise into a multi-faceted tapestry jewel,
a kaleidoscope of redeemed sandy dirt forms,
reflecting Son-Dawn image rays everywhere.

An Inkling, Too.

by Barbara LaTondresse
©February 2016.  All Rights Reserved.

__________________________________

Sources

Image created by Linda Hamer and reshared courtesy of Church of the Cross, 201 9th Avenue North, Hopkins, MN 55343 in  the following source:  LaTondresse, Barbara. “Light a Candle for Hope.” Web log post. http://www.ofthecross.org/light-a-candle-for-hope/. Church of the Cross, 4 Dec. 2014. Web. 19 Feb. 2o16. Copyright © 2016 Church of the Cross

Psalm 123:2, Psalm 62:5, and Revelations 21:4 quoted from the King James Version (KJV) by Public Domain.