Remember The Question?
~from Mary Oliver’s Summer Day from a Poem a Day for American High Schools :
with your one wild and precious life?”
Debbie dropped a line to the inbox that read:
“I, too, have prayerfully, reflected on the Question this week. I copied the poem and left it on my daughter’s bulletin board, above her desk. Last night, she came quietly into my room and whispered, ‘Thank you, Mommy, for the poem that you left for me.’ She and I will continue the conversation later, after we have had much quiet reflection.”
Yes… quiet, prayerful reflection these weeks, Debbie… now fragments of the answer scratched down…
Life is the little walk before. How one takes this walk determines the forever destination. Doesn’t the jaunt require a map, an intentional, purposeful course? For we are a pilgriming people, en route to Somewhere. This is my plan, my chart for the one and only glorious life I’ll ever have:
I plan to rise and pray. Eat and pray. Work and pray. Laugh, cry, dance, wonder, read, wander, embrace…and pray. So I’ll intimately know the curves and deep places of His heart when I birth out of this life and into His arms and Home. I have no other end but Him, and it will be but the beginning. I needs know the language of my country when I get home, the culture, the landscape. So I plan to pray now and enter into His presence, enter into Him, enter in. I plan to make this life about communing with Him whose hands are upon me, who has shaped and formed me, who bends low and whispers, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” I plan to pray and fall in love too.
I plan to tilt it all back, and drink the marrow right out of this gift cup, right to the last drop. I know: joy’s cup is sorrow’s cup by another name. But I am going to wildly drink it dry—entirely empty—anyways. So that just before I take my flight Home, I can turn to Jesus and whisper with Him, “It is fulfilled. Yes, all of it.”
He gives only one life and there are places I choose not to go: I plan (give grace, Father) not to go to the places, innocent though they may seem, that dull me, weaken me, impair me, blind me. For these places, though they may gleam in the sunlight and be marked as “must-sees” sights, are sin to me. I plan to detour that wide and deceptively alluring road, and take that steep and stony path off to the side. I have faith it leads to better sights and heights. And along the journey, I plan to scratch it down, testify, give witness. Leave traces of His grace.
I plan (give grace, Father) not to grumble over the way, the stumble and the scuffing of knees, but to keep pointing, rejoicing, singing over the brimming dawn on the Horizon, the coming of the Son and the wondrous forever light that is seeping into time.
I plan to take this little while and walk before and use it all up with love. To fall, head over heels, in love with Lover, so I may love and pour it all out for those who cross my path. I plan to use the power of His love to grace others with happiness’ warmth, with care’s touch, with hope’s hand. By His grace, I have the power to make others feel love, hope, joy. That is something I can do.
I plan to take this one and glorious life, and use it to die.
That is all: I plan to pray, to drink the cup He gives, to take that stone-strewn way, to leave tracks, to give thanks, to love. It doesn’t seem like much. But this little plan may be enough: “He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Mi 6:8 RSV).
I plan. But only You make it so, Father.
Please do.
