And Ever

Scribbled by Sparrow
There are days, sometimes, when the reality of an Eternity is more pressing than ever before.
 
Days when my hands tremble and my heart pounds. Days when I cannot focus, cannot think, cannot hope to understand the importance of anything visible. Days when I cannot find it in me to be still, and others when I cannot do anything but lie on my floor and wonder when Jesus will come. Days when I cannot even do as much as that.
 
But there are other days. Days when the reality brings a stillness of remembering. Of resting. Of simply knowing, and knowing nothing else, that though a Heaven waits for us, still now we live.
 
And sometimes - just sometimes - it is those days when Heaven is truly closer than ever before.
 
For not even the most beautiful Forever imagined in the mind of God
Was ever meant to take away the preciousness
of this gift of Being.
 



 
Because--
 I almost forgot to say:
Happy Birthday.
Category: 0 missives

When This Autumn Falls

Scribbled by Sparrow
I waited for you at the bench today.

The last time we were there is etched so clearly in my memory. How could I forget it? It was the last time I saw you before you went away. Before you promised me you wouldn't. Before you spoke the only words you would ever break in your life — the only words I never wanted you to break.

There was a time you promised you would never promise me anything. Do you remember that?

The leaves were beautiful. They furled round us in a curtain, scattering like rain on a wind that carried them in a dance like joy. But the dance was a lie; it would only bury them in the grave of the forest's carpet, to wither and die and crumble into the dust that I, too, must someday become. Autumn was always my favorite season. The dimness enthralled me; I was intrigued by the fading, the withering, the dark miracle of a summer so deathless, coming to its end at last. You never did understand me. Spring was your season of choice: you lived for its life, thrived on seeing all that Autumn had strangled come back to bloom again, laughing at the winter that had tried to overtake the world forever and failed. You never could understand my fascination with the dying seasons. You told me, once, that if I fell too far in love with death, life would seem the curse more than otherwise. I didn't believe you, then. I didn't understand.

I understand you now.

I was afraid. You knew I was. And that is when you made your second promise—the one that filled my heart with comfort when first you said it. The one that leaves me as withered as my autumn when I remember it.

You should never have broken the first promise — the one about never promising.

Today I went back. For the first time. The last time. I never should have gone; yet for a fleeting moment, I wanted to believe that your words were somehow stronger. Stronger than the dying world I live in and you no longer do. Stronger than distance. Stronger than time. Stronger even than God.

I can never believe that again. I know the truth now. They say the truth will set you free — so why did I feel lighter inside for the few wild moments when I hoped for a lie? For the truth is more cold and alone, more full of dusk and darkness than the deepest November I have known. The truth is this: when a heart is filled with death, life is truly the curse after all. For an existence lived in the shadow of an ending is hopeless, if the death it longs for has not been removed from its sting.

 That was always what you meant. I never understood. I understand you now.

 And for the first time in my life, I wish it was Spring.

I waited for you at the bench today. You never came.


 - * - 
I found a bench today.
I sat on it, all by myself...
And I have never felt so lonely in all of my life.


Sometimes,
 waiting for Heaven hurts like Death Itself. 

Category: 0 missives

Ghosts

Scribbled by Sparrow
These are some of the most broken, most precious memories that I have.
Each is of a different person, a different place, a different soul--
A different moment that changed my life forever.

Her.  Those huge brown eyes, the most beautiful I'd ever seen. Those tiny hands in mine. The little soul that snuggled its way into my lap, my arms, and the very depths of my heart. A small, vibrant, precious life with an endless capacity to love, to laugh, to sparkle... And to long. To weep. To cry. To be afraid. 
 
You see, she'd never been loved before.

Him. His broken English told that he was a wanderer, but it could not have told how very far his soul had wandered from the very thing it longed for. When first he came to me, a hunger lingered deeply in his eyes. His words were full of desperation, filled with an innocence that only wanted to know if I understood his suffering. He longed for little more than for me to have shared his pain; to know if I had known the helplessness, the depression, the confusion, the darkness that haunted his steps and his dreams.

 I had. And as we spoke, he changed. The dark Hispanic eyes that had been so full of a darkness all their own began to cradle a smile. The smile became a sparkle; as he drew forth from me all that he could about the healing I had found, the burden in his eyes lifted until it was nearly gone. Because I told him about my Jesus, and at last, he found the name of what his wandering heart had been searching for the whole time. 
 
It was Hope.

Her. Her sobs were so great they might have torn her apart. Yet the angry words that spilled from her threatened to tear me apart. I listened as she threatened to drag me away into the darkness, to hurt me, abuse me, to violate me in the most horrifying of ways. It was midnight on the busy boulevard and she was bigger than me; she could have done it. But then I held her in my arms as she begged to know why she felt so safe with me. Because, you see, the things she threatened to do to me were only what she herself had known.
 
She thought she knew what love was. It was brutality.
 
Him. He offered me his battered violin, gathered from yet another story he had yet to tell me; and as I knelt on the cold, littered stones with him, we spoke about the God who imagined music from nothing and treasured lost souls so dearly as to die. As we spoke, his eyes grew wide and he began to ask questions. It captivated him, this idea of love. And as we spoke, his curiosity grew. He wanted to know. Wanted to understand. Wanted to think, to listen. He wanted what I so desperately wanted for him.

Then his friend handed him the drugs. And before my eyes, I watched him forget.
 
Her. She was fishing plastic out of the trash cans, trying to find something, anything that might be traded for the coins that would bring her home. Home to the child whose birthday was being spent without his mother. Home from the freezing midnight that we met her in, from the haunting memories of sickness and hospitals and the cold homelessness that was somehow supposed to be freer than both of them. We gave her clothes. I knew that clothes weren't enough. She needed them. But she needed so much more.
 
I went back. The others were leaving. But I had to go back. Just to tell her how beautiful she was. How loved she was. How precious she was.
 
She wept. And when I finally left, I was weeping too.

Him. He was trying to sleep in the alleyway. Tattoos painted the shell of a soul that was longing for love. A soul that had seen everyone it loved go through pain. His hands trembled in mine. He was suffering, too.

He wept. And wept. And wept.

Them.
 
These are the ghosts of my memories; the ghosts that have heartbeats and names and faces. They walk through my dreams and haunt my prayers. I cannot forget them. I do not want to. To ache for them means that still I am alive. The moment I cease to hurt for them would be the moment I no longer possess a heartbeat.

I have a heartbeat. It rises and falls on the wings of their suffering, their pain, their heaven and their hope. To remember loving them is to remember holding the hands of my Jesus, gathering Him closer in my arms than ever before. To remember.
 
I remember, tonight. 
 
I remember it all.
 
 
Category: 0 missives

An Inescapable Collision

Scribbled by Sparrow
I am afraid of words.

I fear I will never overcome this strange affliction of language. It stifles my prayers. It confuses my thoughts. It takes what is beyond itself and attempts to compress it into a puzzle of vowels and consonants, meaningless scribbles on a page that is in the end just as blank as it was without writing. The strange syllables find their only relief in a lyricism all my own, yet when at last I mold them into vessels my feeble heart can grasp and understand, I find that the sense of what has been formed is lost to all but myself.

It makes me afraid. So, at last, when I can find nothing but meaninglessness in the chaotic void of structure and sound, I abandon it. Abandon words, abandon shapes, abandon this thing called language that tries ever to imprison what will always wither at the imposition of limitation. I hide away in the silence that keeps these blog-pages still and quiet, the silence whose echoes leave others to wonder if I still exist. A silence that is more beautiful to me than words have ever been. A silence that tells stories, and remembers why they matter.

A silence that sometimes, when it finds its stories very meaningful indeed, turns itself into music.


Category: 2 missives

Incoherency

Scribbled by Sparrow
Too much darkness. Too many burdens to be laid upon an all too heavily-laden heart; as though an echoing canyon demands the filling of its emptiness. But more substance does not create less emptiness: only more echoes. And as the chaotic dance of too many directions leaves only a valley of collision, the heart in whom Death's shadow has been overtaken is abandoned to its confusion, overwhelmed by the terrifying volume of the shadow of life. Life that looks too much toward the beating of the heart, and not to the Forever that endures beyond breathing. Too much existence smothers the flickering freedom of eternity. Too much smoke veils the vision of what will linger beyond its dissipation. The sight of that which vanishes has no courage to offer: only the assurance of an end. Disillusionment cradles Disappointment as if in fear for its life, clinging together in the devouring time-hole of expectation whose name is Despair.

No. No more.

I choose Hope.

Too much heartache, hung upon too many loosened chains of loyalty freed with a vengeance. Too many idle words spoken from the shallowness of a heart caring nothing for another's wholeness, too blinded by itself to care if it tarnishes Another's treasure. Too many dreams woven of gossamer too fragile not to tear, too deceitful in its illusion of strength that does not suffer for its beauty. Too little memory for the truths that still linger. They lie invisible, hidden by shrouds of unspoken strengthlessness and overwhelmed by the lulling serenade of lies captivated by a carelessly-built castle of Unreality. Waiting. Wandering. Lost.

But not forgotten.

I choose Promise.

Too harsh the betrayal of hearts whose lovelessness is morphed into language. Universal understanding is ever dependent upon the generosity of shared circumstance; yet barriers cannot exist between the sincerity of a deceitful heart and the searching eyes of the Unending. What is honest only in the beauty of silence becomes terrifying when unspoken meaning lies bare before Faithfulness itself. Treachery may linger behind a veil only until the passing passes, and then the glory of its dross is worn away, leaving only the substance of what is unredeemed. Only truth. Only terror. Only time.

Not this time.

I choose Devotion.

Too much absence. The burden of that which gives no lasting goodbye cuts deeply in the memory of a tomorrow whose loss has not yet been suffered. Fear is the imperfection of a heart: fondness may be the deepening of one, yet for both to exist together betrays the presence of an imperfect depth. To fear the absence of joy is to deny the future of its thankfulness. Past is not a gift to be clung to any more than Future is a gift to be grasped; they fear not loss or aloneness: only the absence of wonder, whose vagrance diminishes the wholeness of a heart.

Not this heart.

I choose Love.

Too many words. Too many choices. Too many partial things that do not describe the whole. I cannot choose the pieces and refuse the picture. A puzzle finished does not diminish the mystery of its pieces: it only deepens the wonder to be found in the masterpiece of its completion. And what remains in the end is not a limitation, but an imagination no longer limited. A soul no longer shattered. A vision made endless by the endlessness of a Lover's devotion.

No longer broken. 

I choose my Jesus.
Category: 0 missives