How is it, Lord, that tears so wet,
So clear upon my face,
Can burn my skin and sting my cheeks,
Can chafe and scar and bind my heart,
Can start an avalanche of long-forgotten mud,
Once dried and caked but now flowing down,
Down the mountain of my heartache
Until the clumps of hardened clay turn to rocks and then to boulders,
Burying the village we grew to be our own
In the mud and grime of neglected desire
And the blight of dampened compassion?
How is it that, in drier times
We could ignore the aridity because it was normal, it was stable,
It was full of warmth except when the winds blew through?
How is it, then, that the chill in the air that came quite regularly
Did not give us pause,
Did not warn us of the impending doom,
The torrential slide of our ugliness,
So heavy that it destroys the beautiful forest
That took decades of love, of planting, of watering, of weed-pulling,
To become the paradise we relied on?
How do we rebuild a life and a community and a faith by our effort
When our own hands that built the village
Were the same that demolished it?
How do we ask you, Lord,
To redeem the flood, to redesign Babel,
To resurrect the temple in 3 days,
But preferably 2?
We are a people of destruction only.
Our goodness only flows for as long as you leave the faucet on.
We have no natural resources for creation,
No redemption skills to bring back what we’ve destroyed.
We are only competent in demolition.
You, Lord, are both blueprint and builder.
You built our foundation with blood and water;
Yet that, at least, still stands.
Resurrect us, Father.
