Poetic license

Long ago, I heard someone ask, “What rhymes with ‘orange’?” I still haven’t discovered the magic word! Although I’ve spent all my working life writing, please, please, please don’t press me to write a poem. I could count on one hand the number of poems I’ve had published, and they squeezed out of me like toothpaste way past its expiration date. (Then there are folks like Greg, a prolific poet-pastor who grew up in my hometown, and whose nationally-read poetry blog about daily life and news morphed into a 268-page book.) I began my writing life with hope. As a college freshman I submitted a poem to the writing contest sponsored by the school’s literary magazine. Want to know its name? Hold on to your seats. It wasn’t “Western Student Literary Review” or “Scribes from our Tribe” or “Words from the Wiser” or anything somewhat sophomoric like that. It was called "Jeopardy." Yes, “Jeopardy,” and this long before millions watched a television show in which three mega-brains showed off their grasp of obscure facts.

I placed something like “honorable mention,” which was quite honorable for a lowly freshman. My poem took the idea of how Michelangelo sensed that “David” was waiting to be carved from that hunk of marble. Likewise, as a writer, I wished great literary effort could emerge from my blank paper. Yes, I know, way out there. Paper is unforgiving whiteness, like the blank computer screen I’m facing now. To be truthful, no greatness oozes from my fingers. It’s blood, sweat, and tears and sometimes a bit of carpel tunnel syndrome from too many revisions.

Anyway, one upper division literature class was going to critique the winning poems from that year’s Jeopardy writing contest. I decided to sit in. Sitting incognito in the back, I thought surely they would realize this generation’s answer to Emily Dickinson (although free verse, not rhymed) was upon the campus. So much for pride. When they started reading immoral analogies into the poem—none of which had ever entered my mind—I seriously wondered whether I was born into the wrong generation. I had written the poem thinking of a quote attributed to Michelangelo regarding “David,” “As the chips fall, the image emerges.” I probably should have chosen to write about a statue with some clothes on.

A few years later when the Bible came alive for me, I was excited to learn that I was a poem—God’s poem. When Paul wrote the Ephesians, “For you are God’s workmanship” (2:10), he used the Greek word poiema. It’s the same root from which we get our English word “poem.” It means “something made.” Just like a literary poem is “made” with meaningful word pictures and rhythm, we are uniquely created by God Himself. We’re signed originals, #1 of one produced. No clones!

But you can’t have the first phrase of Ephesians 2:10 by itself. The rest of that verse reveals our purpose: “created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” God intended, not that we fulfill selfish pleasures, but that we do the “good works” that He already had in mind. We’re get-your-hands-dirty poems. And that, I suppose, describes how Michelangelo finally found “David” in the slab of marble. Every work day he got caked with marble dust, but he knew eventually he would succeed. It took him more than two years.

“As the chips fall…” is just as true of the Christian life. The hammer of adversity only serves to bring out what God intended all along. “Tribulation brings about perseverance…character…hope” (Romans 5:3-5). Hardship isn’t the whole story. It’s part of God shaping our character for eternity. “When the chips fall, don’t bawl. God’s at work. Don’t shirk.” See, I told you I wasn’t much of a poet.