Guest Poet

The voice of Edgar Guest sounds a lot like that of my Daddy and Momma's voices.  I guess that is why I have such an affinity towards his poetry.  I also like the down home dialect he often employs, it's funny and powerful.  He gives the simple, ordinary life an elegance of hope and weight.  Life and love is not mostly lived in lofty towers but in little two and three bedrooms house all around the towns and cities.
If Cowper shouts at eternal truths, and Milton explains their origins, Guest smacks of daily bread and living out the physicality of worship - he takes Cowper and Milton's orthodoxy all the way home to orthopraxy.  I like him. 
I'll be posting a little run on Guest's poetry, because as Andrew Peterson, so poignantly states it, "they were singing out my song, when the song in me had died.' My voice is a little reclusive these days, so I'll borrow the words of others as  my own repertoire of praise, at least for awhile.

When he has more than he can eat
To feed a stranger's not a feat.
 

When he has more than he can spend
It isn't hard to give or lend.

Who gives but what he'll never miss
Will never know what giving is.

He'll win few praises from his Lord
Who does but what he can afford.
 

The widow's mite to heaven went
Because real sacrifice it meant.
                        -Edgar Guest, "Sacrifice"

 

I love the challenge of giving in all areas - you don't know you've given until you feel the loss.  That loss comes in manifest in suffering and when the dross of it all is scraped, you are left with joy.  Loss and suffering is a teeny, tiny, itty bit of what Christ did for us - and we get to share in that with Him. Now there is something to be thankful for... a good bit thankful, indeed.
 

Maturity bids

If you know me well at all, you would probably say I speak mostly fluffese. I have a pattern of seeing silver linings and encouraging -- that is not really  uncommon with folks, like me, who are primarily mercy oriented by bent; however, my predominate pollyanna disposition can bug the bageezers out of the logical, justice oriented thinkers that surround me (who are awesome btw for aligning feeling with fact and futhermore ARE my most favorite of all people: Ed and Kel).
I haven't posted regularly for quite awhile, I post mostly as a open personal journal of sorts, and well, there hasn't been much, that I wanted others to hear me say, openly, recently.  My thoughts have been too close to the vest to share. Polly split town some months back, when her surreal sister, Get Real, showed up.  Get Real with her firmness and self reliances scares me as she challenges every statement that has even been pushed as one of God's little platitudes. 
With a deeply hurting heart and the bottom dropping out of the world as I've known it, truthful sayings smack like barbed clamoring cymbals, and I find myself in hand to hand combat with urge to do a 180 in the opposite of "the good word".  A wonderful little gift, from my newer companion, Get Real. She says,"It is what it is, and IT ain't so good."
The Bible, although true TRUTH, is not a not a book of little promise pills -- you can't just pop in the scripture with the pain popping out as the word goes in.  AM I the only person stupid enough to have carried this baby view in my back pocket for 40 some odd years.  I sure hope so, but, I fear not.
I'm finding Job is a little like the Psalms, lots of words are lost in translation, until God decides it is time for a little language school. 
 God is faithful to wound us to the next maturing level and that is exactly what He is doing in my life, although, I won't, couldn't and am truly reticent to try to label the course, because I know nothing of it, accept a few tidbits.  I know that God is calling me to see His good and loving steadfastness through trouble waters and tricky precipices...and I know that God is calling me "to do the next right thing", for me, that comes in the form of getting up, picking up a dish; or sitting down to pick up a book; or talking when I want to be a hermit; or shutting up when I want to scream.  It also takes the form of praising when I'd rather doubt, and worshipping when I'd rather run.
Pollyanna, has a bit growing up to do- silver lining pain sounds nailish on a chalk board when wounds run deep...however, the thought of becoming that"GET REAL" kind of lady is repulsive - tricked out muscles on a feminine frame - too gross to describe.  I'm struggling to find the balance - where do the two kiss - doo mach (the Kurdish phrase) and how do I learn to live there.  I lack wisdom, I ask of God, it seems every place I turn His Spirit bids me live, bids me hope...bids me health through, not apart from, the hurting.