What does this mean? 1:Corinthians 13:4-8 Martin Luther style

What does this Mean?

1 Corinthians 13:4-8

Martin Luther style.

1: Love is patient

What does this mean?

Love will sit in the parking lot for whatever time you need, to pick you up.

Love will do the laundry you've ignored for weeks.

Love will not mind when you suddenly decide to spend Saturday with friends and leave the homework supervision to it.

Love will sit on the husband's waiting bench while you shop.

Love will drive you 4 hours in a binding snowstorm to see a concert you're desperate to see.

Love waits.

2: Love is kind.

What does this mean?

Love tells you you're beautiful when you're not.

Love helps you fold laundry in the middle of its favorite show.

Love will dig up half the yard for a garden you only have in your head.

Love will not say I told you so.

Love will hold your hand and make it be okay, even at 2 AM.

3: Love does not envy.

What does this mean?

Love will let you sleep when you are both exausted and not be angry about not having a turn.

Love will let you take a weekend away while it is forced to drive kids to 6 different places on its own.

Love does not wish to have the peace of mind you have, but instead seeks to share it.

4: Love does not boast.

What does this mean?

Love will not point out that it is smarter than you.

Love does not claim to be the bread winner.

Love does not point out that it could have done a better job fixing the playhouse than you.

Love does not talk about you like a trophy wife, or husband.

Love does not claim better cooking skills.

5: Love is not proud.

What does this mean?

Love does not take all the credit for your children's academic success.

Love does not stand over you and claim you as a dependant.

Love does not show off its talents but uses them for the good of others.

Love does not simply take from you what it desires.

6: Love does not dishonor others.

What does this mean?

Love does not take the glory for itself or lay the blame upon another, but supports the team as a whole, win or lose.

Love does not treat the elderly as senile and unimportant.

Love does not ask for favors that are inappropriate, or dangerous.

Love does not lead you astray.

7: Love is not self-seeking.

What does this mean?

Love does not enter into a relationship for money, sex, family name, or position.

Love does not demand of its partner what they do not wish to give.

Love considers it's partner before making personal requests upon them.

Love always has it's partners best interest in mind.

8: Love is not easily angered.

What does this mean?

Love will listen before jumping to conclusions.

Love will attempt to understand the situation.

Love will let mistakes go.

Love will look for a constructive resolution.

9: Love keeps no record of wrongs.

What does this mean?

Love forgives.

Love does not bring painful situations up over and over again.

Love does not want to get back at you.

Love does not believe you ‘owe it one’.

Love wants to begin again.

10: Love does not delight in evil.

What does this Mean?

Love does not want anyone to fail.

Love does not say ‘it serves him right’.

Love does not say ‘she was asking for it’.

Love does not celebrate getting a raise over someone else's loss.

Love is not happy that a person has been removed from their lives, but prays for that person.

11: Love rejoices with the truth.

What does this mean?

Love finds the truth to be a begining, not an end.

Love find truth a relief and not a burden.

Love will stand in the kitchen and bug you till it all spills out.

Love will meet with your teacher and find solutions to your difficulties.

Love will hold you while you cry even if your words are painful.

12: Love always protects.

What does this mean?

Love will set boundaries for biking in the neighborhood.

Love will set curfew.

Love will pick you up any time any where and ask no questions.

Love will meet you just to talk if only to keep you safe from harm for a few more minutes.

Love will stay on the phone.

13: Love always trusts.

What does this mean?

Love will not hold you captive.

Love knows you will come around on your own.

Love allows you to choose your own path.

Love allows you to try new things, or old things.

Love believes in you no matter what.

14: Love always hopes.

What does this mean?

Love will wait for you to come to church.

Love believes one day you will know you are a child of God.

Love thinks that one day you will let go of that ancient pain.

Love supports you in every endeavour till you find your place.

Love keeps going on a wish and a prayer that it will have the resources to help you find your place in this world.

Love wants you to one day no-longer be in pain and confusion.

15: Love always perseveres.

What does this mean?

Love will sit up typing for you while you speak your history paper till 2AM.

Love will help you solve your physics projects hang-ups three nights in a row.

Love will learn Latin and chemistry for you, to help you pass classes it failed in college.

Love goes on living when it's spouse is gone.

Love will find your lost earring, your lost glasses, your lost contact, your lost knife, your lost wallet.

Love will keep saying yes.

16: Love never fails.

What does this mean?

Love shares it's experiences even when they are hard to speak.

Love outlasts the storm.

Love keeps living.

Love sometimes means not liking, but still loving.

Love can always find forgiveness, acceptance, reconciliation.

Love clings to Jesus and puts him in the middle.

Love hangs it's only Son, Itself, on an old wooden cross, and takes on the sin of every jeering voice in the crowd, and every human being ever made.

Love is born in a barn, lives as a homeless man, suffers like a criminal, and dies like a traitor.

And Love lives again.

Life in Specific

Life in Specific

For Lynn, I love it that you ‘get me’.

At the end of a long day

you're sitting on the deck with a nice chilled beer in your hand and the sun on your face……

Of course, you're there because you're waiting for the dogs to pee so you can bring them back in before they destroy your brand new plant for the third time.

And the beer is a root beer because you're not done shuffling kids around yet and you have an evening work meeting in 2 hours.

And anyway, the chair is pinching you because it's plastic and the arm is broken and you haven't had spring clean up yet really.

And this is when you hear a full blown argument erupt in the kitchen over whether or not there is a natural occurring biological substance that can cross the blood brain barrier. So while you're solving that issue using Google, you discover that your wifi is down and while your tech son goes to fix it, and you try to put your children where they need to be to do their homework effectively,

the dogs dig up your new plant.

The answer by the way is yes. It is frankincense.

Which could in a roundabout way explain why Jesus never cried. The Frankincense was making the calming aromatics around him, and the pheromones of a mother's love for her baby, flood his brain with peace.

And you congratulate yourself in sounding like an educated adult, even if it was only in your head. Especially since baby Jesus must have cried.

Except now your youngest child is eating cupcakes and fruit loops before a three hour gymnastics practice.

Your teenage son is in the front porch with headphones on hopefully looking up Latin terms on his phone, but probably watching you tube.

And your 16 year old is in the kitchen making the dinner you know damn well you should be making yourself.

There's nothing general about it. It's the same every day.

Of course, you wouldn't wish them away for anything.

Sung in South Dakota

Harold's Song

Two little boys

with some nails and a hammer

built themselves a treehouse

amongst a lot of clamour.

Filled it up with memories,

lights and posters hung above,

had some wild adventures

and maybe learned to love.

And as those little boys grew up

so came their teenage trappings.

Pirate boat turned clubhouse

where girls could come a rapping.

Oh the lessons on that floor

that paved the way to preference

of lust and need and maybe love

between the boys I referenced.

As other friends would come and go

their bond would never break

desire, humor, sorrow, fear,

even anger could it take.

But years pass by and defenses fail

and minds can be deceived

and ‘maybe love’ turned very real,

must now somehow be grieved.

My tree house stood alone and empty

so I burned it to the ground

but it exists within my memory

where that sorrows always found.

I share it with many other houses

and other girls and boys

whose fallen hideouts and secret spaces

now hold silence where once was joy.

But now and again their eyes grow bright

remembering those lives with laughter

the times they had, the dreams they shared,

thinking “screw what followed after”.

תַּרְדֵּמָה

תַּרְדֵּמָה

For Pastor Trapp, 

Who made the old testament

come alive for me.

I know that this

terrible storm

is my fault.

I know what

I need to do

to fix it.

I just can't

take the

jump.

Innocent lives

will be lost because

of me.

Strangers try

to save me

even so.

I just can't

take the

jump.

They must

throw me over

or be lost,

But they become

your people

because

I just can't

take the

jump.

Again and again

you send me

to do your will.

Again and again

I run

the other way.

I just can't

take the

jump.

You redirect me,

you drag me

to my purpose.

I sulk,

I drag my feet,

I grumble.

I just can't

take the

jump.

But again,

despite my failure

to comply

a whole city

is saved by a king

who obeys you.

I just can't

take the

jump.

I desire destruction,

loathe forgiveness,

refuse to repent.

I slink away in anger

feeling like a fool

and I am one,

I just can't

take the

jump.

All of your grace

all of your mercy

all of your power

Abundantly evident,

you try to teach me

but still I rebel.

I just can't

take the

jump.

My heart is

in tardemah

unable to wake to you.

Would only that

it be my soul instead,

at peace

So that I

could take the

jump.

                            

ָ

Zephaniah Every Day

Zephaniah Every Day

He will rejoice over you with joyful songs. Zephaniah 3:17

Caught in the light of a splendid window,

laying in a paint pallet on the church floor

seeking in my bible the words You would have me hear,

I can almost imagine You singing.

I can almost see that day,

when all are believers,

when finally you can call us all home.

As we come running to you,

arms open as children to their father,

I can almost hear You singing.

My father used to sing to me in the morning,

so early before he drove me to school for band rehearsal,

hours before he needed to be awake.

Used to sing:

Oh what a beautiful morning……

or You Are My Sunshine.

He sang that to his discontented teenage daughter who was stealing the money he left on the buffet by  accident.

Every day.

I can almost hear You singing too.

Right through the angry, the rebellion,

the hurt and the hate,

the lies, and the ungrateful

mixed up lives that all we human ‘teenagers’ live.

All the time singing and shepherding us along to wherever we think we need to be.

Watching over us all the time.

You're always in the driver's seat, because we never grow up.

And to be honest, like my dad, I think you're playing the oldies station.

And it bugs me now like it did then.

But every time I turn that station on, I think of him.

And, like Happy Together and Jail House Rock put me back in his car,

Morning Has broken, I hear you Calling, and I Am The Bread Of Life

puts me firmly back in Yours.

But sometimes, just on the edge of my belief,

I think I can hear You singing to me.

And I suspect now,

That you do it

every day.

I suspect he sang to me even after I walked away from him, even after I took what was his.

Every day.

I'd say I don't deserve your Songs, i'd say I havn't earned them, I'd say You're wasting them on me. That You have no reason to rejoice in me.

And all of that is true, except for the part where I became free from my sin, became extraordinary, became white as snow.

And now, in this puddle of light reading these words, that I had no idea even existed, so blown away by the idea of God singing praises to me, all I can do is try to understand. Made more overwhelming by the fact that somewhere in my mind, there's a voice growing ever louder by the moment, telling me:

Every Day.

Above it All

Above All

It's really not about that.

It never is.

I hurt.

I ask you those stupid mundane questions

when I hurt.

I am looking for normal.

I am looking for safe.

I am looking for ‘don't give up’.

I am looking for ‘I understand’

I am looking for ‘no matter what’

But it seems that I can never say

the thing that matters.

Just wake up, wake up!

WAKE UP.

Stop letting the world deceive you,

find what you know is true.

Sort it out, put it together for God's sake.

“I took the fall, and thought of you, above all”.

So think, dammit, think.

Can't Have your Cake and eat it Too

Can't Have your Cake and Eat it Too

It's funny,

Sometimes you're calling out so loud, and you're wishing those screaming thoughts could reach out

and capture someone else's mind.

And there's this potency to them,

knowing you'll fail,

and it'll break you when you do,

but you just have to try.

And the music flowing through your ears is just not enough to satisfy.

And the green and the sun and the water can't make you feel better.

I lean my back up against this steady pillar taking the pressure of sharp rocks away from my sore skin.

The peace and quiet here is perfect.

The dock was heaven today,

blue windy warm water.

But I'm always searching for something more.

I have half an hour to let the stream run over my feet and then I will be in the grip of a frustrated world again.

There's enough heat here to make me fall asleep.

This was a beautiful place in the snow and ice. Delicate.

Cold but warm.

Now it's warm but cold.

Just a few months and mother nature can claim wherever she wants.

The cars above me sound so far away,

racing along on their way to somewhere

while I rest exactly where I want to be.

I hope they have places they want to be, and can stay in them.

I hope they can stop running.

Serenity prayer, that's all I got today

This is all I got today

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.