a poem...

tomorrow sun
by me

if tomorrow is like yesterday
then i'll be hoping today will never come
as the days slip around me with hushed steps

"i'm really okay," i whisper to the
slinky breeze that would tousle
my hair if i had any left

it's not like i didn't expect time
to keep moving on without me or
at least without my consent

but it's really okay this time
for me to move on to something new
without looking back too hard or too often

the future isn't that bleak or that exciting
this time around as i make the decision
to just keep going forward

i put my hand in yours and feel
the breeze whispering sweet words of
comfort in my ears

and you pull me along in spite
of where i tell myself i want to be
in this messy dénouement

you make me okay with today
when i can't reconcile it in my own
tumultuous minding game

so we press forward with each step
and move away from our shadows and
into tomorrow's sun

dayenu!

what an incredible thing i just experienced. tonight i attended a passover seder. this is not the first time i have done this though. in fact, last year my community group shared a passover seder together. it was incredible. but tonight...oh tonight...it is hard to describe such an awesome event...

you see i celebrated the passover seder and feast at green valley baptist church, my home church in hoover, alabama. that's right. green valley. for a good while i have associated the baptist churches of my upbringing to be synonymous with backward thinking and staunch southern baptist traditionalism. i can't do that anymore. green valley branched out tonight in a way i would have never expected in a million years. four hundred people came together to celebrate passover.

four hundred. they were expecting maybe half that. to me, one hundred would have been sufficient. dayenu - it would have been sufficient. how interesting. over the course of two hours tonight we worked through a twenty-seven page haggadah. I have never been more proud of green valley. i feel like i'll write a more substantial blog on this and passover in general later, but i just needed to get those initial feelings out.

How great is God's goodness to us! For wach of God's acts of mercy and kindness we declare dayenu - it would have been sufficient.

If the Lord had merely rescued us,
But had not judged the Egyptians,

dayenu!

If God had only destroyed their gods,
but had not parted the Red Sea,

dayenu!

If God had only drowned our enemies
but had not fed us with manna,

dayenu!

If God had only led us through the desert,
but had not given us the Sabbath,

dayenu!

If God had only given us the Torah,
but not the land of Israel,

dayenu!

But the Holy One, blessed be God, provided all of these blessings for our ancestors. And not only these, but so many more.

Blessed are you, O God, for you have, in mercy, supplied all our needs. you have given us Messiah, forgiveness for sin, life abundant and life everlasting. Hallelujah!

failure...

i am sitting here taking yet another break from this stupid new testament exegesis paper. i have been pouring over this thing for the last two weeks trying to turn the exegesis of four verses into a six page paper. i can discuss exegesis and methods therein for hours, but for some reason turning those thoughts into a coherent paper is eating at my soul.

there is always that issue i have with basing my academic worth on the opinions of my professors in their grading of my papers. it doesn't help that i have way more going on in my head that is unnecessary for this paper than i can sort through. the basic idea is to use exegesis to support and refute an interpretation of this passage. that's all well and good, but i can't find the words to make this paper seem effective.

i know this is a rant in the midst of a poor state of mind, but i just needed to get all that off my chest. okay. back to typing...