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Today’s text
Psalm 80:7, 14-15
let your face shine, that we may be saved. …
Turn again, O God of hosts;
look down from heaven, and see;
have regard for this vine,
the stock that your right hand planted.
Soil
I can never move home again.
The ground where
You planted me is home
no longer.
It formed me. I lived
close to the soil and to
those who labored on
it, struggling
with winds and weather,
rain and its lack, who went
to their rest with
soil-stained hands,
laid, finally, beneath the soil
which had pained and pleased
them, the soil where they,
like me, had been planted.
I knew this ground,
the country roads and
town streets I walked,
every rough spot in the asphalt,
soft places where the asphalt
cracked and sank, where
potholes appeared and were
filled again each spring.
.
I walked them a thousand
times, kicking rocks up the street
to salve adolescent wounds,
releasing anger at the
confines of this world,
hoping for a world beyond
my teachers and tormentors
where someone would see
me, beyond their image
of what I was, even though
I didn’t know myself. I knew
Only that this piece of soil
in which I was planted
was not home
and could never be.
You meant me to grow
like the fields of corn, no,
more like the hay
and sweet clover that
doesn’t march in neat rows.
You planted me in that
particular soil,
Holy One, a peculiar plant
that needed that place
to fill my senses
with the fragrance of
growing things, stirring hope
to know a world beyond
the soil which grew me.
Look at this soul planted
in the soil of this earth, now
far from the fields of hay
and sweet clover and the
soil-stained dignity of the
hands who worked it.
Tend the growing of this
peculiar plant that is yet
to be that the seed you
planted may bring its harvest
of grace and the beauty
of the fields that still stir
my heart.
I would be as they.
Pr. David L. Miller
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