Two

years passed
since your
passing;
since the moment
your life
ceased
with a final
lunge;
since the loosed
departure
into a void
not seen
and your presence
lost.

Two years of days
and hours
and minutes
and seconds
and breaths
and beats
that never belonged
to you.

Too long
years.


(for Dad)

writing about grace

I have spent a good deal of my adult life trying to understand grace. Most of this has been through the routines of life - marriage, studying, prayer, parenting, worship, reading, and friendship. Many years ago I devoted some of my routine to writing a book about grace. No one has seen or heard of the book since, and though I have quite a knack for authoring books that no one ever hears of, there is a good explanation in this case. The book was never published. I sent my two-hundred-fifty-page manuscript to several different publishers, and each of them responded with a permutation of the standard "thanks, but no thanks" letter.

Fifteen years later, I am grateful that book was never published. It was a book produced by an overachieving young assistant professor who was committed to routine but had not yet had enough moments of insight to write about grace. It was a book written before I began to grasp the depth of brokenness and sin in our world and in my own heart. Understanding grace cannot be done without understanding sin. Sometimes I ponder what that unpublished book, with its anemic view of grace, would have been titled if it had been published. Perhaps, Grace Lite or Grace: Because I'm Worth It or Grace: I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me.

In the intervening fifteen years I have continued to experience occasional punctuating moments - windows of insight - that have brought fresh glimpses of grace. They are not altogether pleasant moments because they are always accompanied with a weighty, breath-stealing awareness of my sin and my desperate need for forgiveness. But they are motivating. It is the second of two such punctuating moments that finally gave me the courage to write this book.

(Why Sin Matters by Mark McMinn, pp.2,3; Tyndale 2004)

When the big boys come calling....

Mike Rohde, we salute ya.

The Last Of The Peasantry

What does he know? moving through the fields
And the wood's echoing cloisters
With a beast's gait, hunger in his eyes
Only for what the flat earth supplies;
His wisdom dwindled to a small gift
For handling stock, planting a few seeds
To ripen slowly in the warm breath
Of an old God to whom he never prays.

Moving through the fields, or still at home,
Dwarfed by his shadow on the bright wall,
His face is lit always from without,
The sun by day, the red fire at night;
Within is dark and bare, the grey ash
Is cold now, blow on it as you will.

(R. S. Thomas)