Face it: you were dead. A zombie, well dressed.
Junked, addicted to your distrustful stupor,
sucked in and thrown away by the world’s lies,
self-shelled and painted with all the popular memes,
following the smell of anxiety you thought was good,
dancing, doomed, down a dead-end alley.
Fake happiness had its poison talons in you
the whole time, mummifying your heart.
That anger, that hollow despair we called toughness,
gold-medal swimming in quicksand—yeah, we all had it,
furious at our self-destruction, but looking good.
Then in that trash heap, with bricks for hearts,
in that graveyard we called life, Mercy itself
came with enormous love and grabbed us
and for no reason other than wanting to
just plain made us alive.
The Beloved, rising out of our garbage cans,
wrapped loving arms around us and ripped us out
into this life, this light, this being.
You’ve been salvaged.
Set up like a refugee in a place God fixed up for you
deep in God’s heart, where you always belonged.
This miracle we saw in the Beloved,
this infinite kindness, lasts forever.
It’s not about you—it happens to the worst of us—
you didn’t do it, deserve it, ask for it
or even know it was happening.
It’s pure gift, pure wonder, absolute mystery.
You are now what God created you—all of us—to be
from the very beginning:
pure goodness, alive. Alive and for real.
Astonishing, huh?
—March 7, 2018