Grief is such an odd thing.
Healthy, normal, even beneficial.
Like a hurricane.
Qualified only by the potential damage done without it.
Blood is taken for granted until the wound occurs,
I stare in disbelief as it leaks out of me.
Ever knowing it was there but... seeing it on the surface invokes wonderment.
A wise man said that prayer is to the soul as blood is to the body.
After the injury, both flow freely.
Grief is a great revealer. Of guilt.
Had I done this. If only I had acted. Surely I failed them.
And I pray more.
Shame sneers at me because I only pray in crisis.
And I know it.
There is no solution. Just the wait.
But sand settles to the bottom of the hourglass,
I look up and there is more clarity, and the edge of the pain has softened.
Where there was once wholeness is the beginning of a scar.
The woodworker most prizes the burl.
A knotted, gnarled growth that forms on the wounded oak.
The limb has broken, leaving a hole.
But the tree heals. What is left is still living, moving, growing...
A large, rough, rounded protrusion.
Within this disfigurement is a chaotic, twisted mass of folded wood, sap, and resin.
Impossibly hard, and angry.
But in the hands of a woodworker, a burl is turned, shaped, and polished into a treasure,
Marble-like, other-worldly... Begging the question: how?
How could something so lovely come from anguish?
So many amazing people, encounters dim and fading in my memory,
Some long passed through the door still before me.
More than I knew - these most-pleasant souls
Saw the direst of fears and most grievous hurts.
The kind of things that keep men up at night.
But one would never know, unless you just knew.
These were trees covered with burls.
The Master seeks these out. He knows what to do with them.
The loveliest people we know are also the most scarred.
From the forge of their pain is fashioned
Something eternal that enriches the rest of us immeasurably.
Walking forward even now
Because they denied death its progress
Drove up a stake
And said "No further, not today."
And the sweet amber that is Christ,
Has flowed over us all that remember
And made us more beautiful than we were.
