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| "Summer Night", AkagenoSaru |
All
You Can See or Imagine
Who
has scooped up the ocean
in
his two hands,
or
measured the sky between his thumb and little finger,
who
has put all the earth's dirt in one of his baskets,
weighed
each mountain and hill?
Who
could ever have told God what to do
or
taught him his business?
What
expert would he have gone to for advice,
what
school would he attend to learn justice?
...
"So
- who is like me?
Who
holds a candle to me?" says The Holy.
Look
at the night skies:
Who
do you think made all this?
Who
marches this army of stars out each night,
counts
them off, calls each by name,
-
so magnificent! so powerful! -
and
never overlooks a single one!
Why
would you ever complain, O Jacob,
or
whine, Israel, saying,
"God
has lost track of me,
He
doesn't care what happens to me'?
Don't
you know anything? Haven't you been listening?
God
doesn't come and go. God lasts.
He
doesn't get tired out, doesn't pause to catch his breath.
And
he knows everything, inside and out.
He
energizes those who get tired,
gives
fresh strength to dropouts.
For
even young people tire and drop out,
young
folk in their prime stumble and fall.
But
those who wait upon God get fresh strength.
They
spread their wings and soar like eagles,
They
run and don't get tired,
they
walk and don't lag behind.
Isaiah
40:12-14, 25-31
fr.
The Message
Some
prefer the more poetic King James version of the Bible (I think, when
it comes down to it, I do too). But there is something interesting
about the way Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the Bible brings a
new slant to the old familiar words. I like to read both, or several
versions, just to compare the tone and feeling each conveys. This
passage is a wonderful example of a “wake-me-up”. Something to
take up after a sleepless night in which your worries have grown to
enormous scope and
paralyzing power, where the guilty corners of conscience are full of
ugly and unshakable recollections, where the fear that there are
nothing but odds against and nothing to even us, to balance, to
restore or right us, and
then, the morning – my gosh, have you ever felt that
inexplicable loneliness of simply being alive? Well that’s when I
take up the wake-up poetry, the
break-up-this-narrowing-mental-corridor-going-nowhere poetry; and
listen to me on this, there is no better place
to find this but in the Bible. It’s like a hand upraised, a voice
that says, “Peace. Be still.” And it stops. It all stops. The
noise in my head, the tightness of my chest, the snowballing
thoughts. It’s like being off-kilter, out
of joint, askew, and
having someone take me
by the shoulders and set me
right in
place. My
place. Where I
fit,
where
I
belong.
“Who
is like me?”
Oh
yeah. There it is. That’s right. My God, my
God, my heavenly father – he knows. He has not forgotten. He has
not been sleeping or looking the other way. He is working, he has
never paused, hesitated, or faltered. He has not changed his mind
about loving me. I can shake off this weight. I can stand up
straight. I can go on.
The
King James version gets the spirit of the last verse best -
“They
that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength;
they
shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they
shall run and not grow weary;
and
they shall walk, and not faint.”
