Month: January 2023

Here’s the second one I’m posting today; see here for the first.

I have consistently found writing poetry to be more productive in engaging with questions than other things I’ve tried throughout my life. Prayer alone with no written tether gets mind-messy. Journaling has been a mixed bag, sometimes bringing clarity and sometimes finding me caught in a mind loop seeking an intangible settledness that never comes. What I’m desiring is something that allows me to be truly honest and then actually facilitates hearing from God about and into my questions.

This poem’s specific topic is about the spiritual practices of solitude and silence. Over the last couple months, God seems to have been reminding me of those and leading them to renewed attention in my own life. I recently took two Thursdays in a row out at a delightful cabin to try to respond — they were (as pretty much any intentional solitude pursuit, to be distinguished from merely being alone, in my life has been) enjoyable and quietly significant.

I wrote this poem at the end of the first time (the one I wrote at the beginning of my day there was called “Questions,” very creative titling, no?), using the topic of solitude itself to springboard into some of my own challenge of living the strange and God-says-it’s-wonderful-so-it-must-be-true embodied life of John William Schwartz. The “tile” refers to where I was sitting in an empty room at a nearby ministry building in January of 2002 when I, inspired by Dallas Willard and Sarah (Schultz) Hartman, decided to try to integrate the practice of solitude and silence into my weekly life. (Let me know if you have questions about any of the other references; this is definitely a poem embedded in my own life.)

My hope is that this poem might help each of you reading it to intentionally find your own ways of genuinely interacting with and connecting with God’s voice and heart. I love you all. Truly. John 17:3.

Sort of excited to do my new post-a-poem-every-Tuesday plan. But as I said in the last full paragraph of my first post, no promises. (Not to make everything come back to OCD, but one of its rules is anything can become compulsive … so I have to pay attention to the motive/drive behind any commitment or rhythm.)

Anyway, I’m excited enough where I decided to do two … one here, and then this other one here. I had two totally different type poems I was choosing from, and I thought, hey — why choose?

This one, “Spitting out the Fruit,” is a Bible poem; I wrote it as an “I will” action statement after reading John 8:1-11 with a friend in a Discovery Bible Study to help me reflect further on it. The other one, “More Questions,” is a different type–more directly personal.

I don’t know if you want to read the passage first or afterwards. Some of you may be familiar with it already … again, it’s John 8:1-11.

As always, honored by any engagement whatsoever with either of them!

I’m thinking about posting a poem every Tuesday. I’ve got it on my task list, so we’ll see. 🙂 If any of you reading this would enjoy that, maybe put that on the Facebook post or email me at john@ichthusmhk.org…

Anyway, here’s another poem about OCD, along with the original post describing this in my life and also this one from last week. I told you it was a frequent theme.

Don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want the key/”twist” of the poem given to you before you read it. (I, for one, need all the help I can get when I’m reading someone’s poem, but some of y’all like to try to figure these things out.) Anyway, I mentioned something to someone about having “three letters” connected with my life (O-C-D) and then the thought came to me of them being three actual letters, like the kind you get in the mail.

So that’s this one! I thought it was sorta clever haha.

I haven’t been loving the poor quality of my screen shots, so I’m going to see if this looks any better.

MY DEVILISH PEN PAL
I found three letters in my tent
none of them were sweet and light
and I have so many questions
‘bout and with this edge of night

the first was like a bomb
shooting flames of fear and guilt
demanding that I give account
demanding that I will

the second was a sequel
like unto the fore
and this one called for action
lest I never feel secure

the third was more a summ’ry
and a judgment of malaise
and I s’pose even a hinge of hope
if a lens would change my ways

these letters like this cosmos sphere
stab my heel and beat my mind
must I read them ‘til the dawning day
I s’pose I must unless I’m blind

I was on kitchen crew for a retreat last weekend (Zero Hour Ministries, great group and mission) and had a lengthy conversation one evening with a fellow OCD-sufferer. (See this post for my explanation/poem on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.) The conversation was so very enjoyable, marked by that difficult-to-put-into-words feeling when someone “gets it,” truly gets what you are trying to say in a way that few other people can. Finishing sentences with exactly what you were going to say, when usually at that point you’d just be getting a somewhat quizzical look haha. Very meaningful.

It inspired me to post another poem about OCD — one of my most frequent poem topics, as right-brain and integrative-brain activities are really helpful to combat the brain lock of OCD.

Happy new year!