Archives for 2010

The inspiring life of Ken Taylor, author of the best-selling Living Bible

I really enjoyed My Life: A Guided Tour, autobiography of Ken Taylor, author of The Living Bible, which he self-published because he could not find anyone else to take it. This led to the founding of Tyndale House, the successful Bible publishers.The best ideas whether in writing, art, or business do not originate with the desire to make money. They are consistent with an individual’s passions and interests, with whom one is. Money is likely to follow those who follow the golden thread of their passions.

And in business as in writing, the trick is to find the right form for something you feel passionately about!

A seminary-trained clergyman who has never had a pastorate, Taylor, has been involved in publishing for most of his adult life. Using his pen as a pulpit, he has preached to millions of readers all over the world.

Ken Taylor, Translator of The Living Bible, Dies at 88

Kenneth Nathaniel Taylor, who founded Tyndale House Publishers after he had been unable to find a company willing to publish his Bible paraphrases, died at age 88 on Friday.

Tyndale House is now a leading publisher of Christian books and resources. Taylor’s biblical paraphrase, which became The Living Bible, sold more than 40 million copies in North America alone. In 1950, Taylor also founded the Christian Booksellers Association, a trade association of Christian stores, publishers, and other retail companies now known simply as CBA. He also created the missions organizations Evangelical Literature Overseas and Short Terms Abroad (which merged with Seattle-based Intercristo in 1976).

While we at Christianity Today gather comments and remembrances from those who knew Taylor well, here is a brief biographical sketch from the Kenneth Taylor collection at Wheaton College, from which Taylor received his B.S. in zoology from in 1938 and an honorary doctorate in literature in 1965:

* * *

Kenneth Nathaniel Taylor was born May 8th, 1917, in Portland, Oregon, to George and Charlotte Taylor. The senior Taylor, an aggressive soulwinner, pastored the Queen Anne Hill United Presbyterian Church where the family resided in the parsonage next door. Later they moved to Seattle, then Beaverton, Oregon.

Kenneth, eagerly attending Sunday school, was early impressed with the inestimable value of Scripture. He once saw his father accidentally drop a Bible; and with almost ceremonial gentility, the Reverend Taylor picked it up from the floor. Kenneth respected the Word, but he wrestled with archaisms in the King James Bible—a certain portent of future editorial tasks. As publisher and writer, he would similarly honor the Bible and its effective communication.

After high school in 1934, Taylor enrolled at Wheaton College in Illinois, where he enthusiastically embraced a bounty of opportunity, performing well academically and participating in athletics. Most importantly, his spiritual life deepened significantly as he heard challenging chapel messages proclaimed by pulpit luminaries such as Dr. H.A. Ironside, renowned pastor of Moody Church in Chicago.

Taylor’s college years were not entirely free of discord. Reading Borden of Yale, he discovered that God allowed William Borden, a vibrant and wholly dedicated Christian, to die miserably of fever. Taylor, shattered at this apparent waste, deliberately turned his back on God. Then, he reflects, God “reached out and grabbed me and pulled me back.” Deeply contrite, he surrendered his life to any and all spheres of Christian service.

Another crisis was deciding whether to marry Margaret West, a high-school friend who had transferred to Wheaton College. In time their relationship, however rocky, progressed to deeper commitment; after several tumultuous seasons of dating, they married in 1940.

From 1940 to 43, he pursued his Th.D at Dallas Theological Seminary, then in its infancy, sitting under the school’s esteemed founder, Lewis Sperry Chafer. There the Taylors had Rebecca, the first of 10 children. Toward the end of his studies, Taylor received invitation to edit HIS magazine, offices located in Chicago. He moved his family to suburban Wheaton, Illinois, and finished his coursework at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Satisfied at HIS, he nevertheless accepted an invitation to join Clyde Dennis, founder of Good News Publishers, in tract translation and foreign distribution, a missionary endeavor dear to Taylor. When printing operations gradually shifted to Switzerland, he resigned and joined the editorial staff at Moody Bible Institute, remaining for 16 years. One day he was excitedly approached by a student keenly interested in distributing Moody gospel literature in Mexico. Years later, the young man, George Verwer, founder of Operation Mobilization, would again distribute books and Bibles for Taylor.

During his tenure at Moody, Taylor also created Evangelical Literature Overseas (ELO), a foundation dedicated to developing and disseminating Christian literature to third world countries.

Administrative responsibilities frequently intruded on quality time with his growing family, often creating tension. However, the combination of editorial mind with fatherly heart sometimes afforded splendid creative opportunities. When he and Margaret read to their children, Taylor lamented that there was no book that covered the whole Bible for youngsters. As their kids brought home Sunday school lessons, he handwrote stories to match the pictures, asking if the stories made sense.

Encouraged by favorable responses, he submitted the material, subsequently published by Moody Press as The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes, an all-time bestselling children’s book. Then followed a sequel, Stories for the Children’s Hour andDevotions f
or the Children’s Hour, a condensation of Chafer’s theology courses.

Noting the success of these titles, he recalled his longstanding dissatisfaction with the King James Bible; the text simply didn’t make sense to his children. Perhaps he could paraphrase the entire Bible for grown-ups as he’d done for children? Most daunting, but he would try. Commuting by train to Chicago each day, he utilized his travel time for paraphrasing the scriptures into contemporary language, beginning with the New Testament.

His basic text, the American Standard Version of 1901, provided “the most accurate of the word-for-word English translations.” For the early drafts, poet Luci Shaw served as stylistic consultant. After several laborious attempts at capturing appropriate expression and cadence, he at last completed it. Acquiring a loan, he published Living Letters in 1962. Sales were patchy, but in 1963 its marketing received an incalculable boost when Billy Graham announced his ambition to offerLiving Letters to anyone in his viewing audience desiring a copy.

Tremendously successful, Living Letters received wide distribution under the auspices of Taylor’s newly formed company, Tyndale House Publishers—named after William Tyndale, the 16th-century Bible translator—allowing him to quit Moody Press. Tyndale House’s second title, a Spanish translation of David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade, sold 100,000 copies in 1965. In years following, Taylor paraphrased the remainder of Scripture, publishing it as The Living Bible. Endorsed by Jerry Falwell, Bill Bright, Chuck Swindoll, and other evangelical leaders, The Living Bible has been translated into numerous languages.

Taylor held prayer as absolutely central to his life, constantly developing deeper, more disciplined patterns. Models of prayer warriors are George Muller, founder of English orphanages, and “Praying Hyde,” missionary to India. In My Life: A Guided Tour, Taylor reflected: “I learned that prayer brings power, but character grows through reading and obeying the Word of God—the Scriptures.”

His son, Mark, is currently the president of Tyndale House, publishers of The New Living Translation (a translation rather than a paraphrase), the bestselling Left Behind series, the McGee and Me! video series and a substantial backlist of fiction and nonfiction.

From Christianity Today.

Ken Taylor is a charming, humble, modest man. He was born and died in the same year as my own father, both at 89. I wish my Father had been a Christian in the way Taylor was. It’s a more blessed life. But I myself should endeavour to be so.

In Which God Spoke to Me in my Dream

By Anita Mathias

How does God speak to us? Scripture, providential circumstances, through wise Christian friends, in prayer.

And one of the ways God speaks to us is through our minds and imaginations, consciousness and sub-consciousness.

In dreams.

One of my desires is to be a clear channel for God’s spirit, to let nothing hold me back.

So when I prayed a few days ago, I asked like the Psalmist David, “See if there be any wicked way in me, anything which might hold me back from experiencing your fullness.”

Anyone I have not forgiven.

And I slept and dreamt, and two people entered my dreams.
People I had not forgiven.
People it was very hard for me to forgive.

And what might prevent me stepping into the powerful waterfall of God’s goodness, grace, mercy, forgiveness, blessing, brilliance and power?

Stepping out of it, grabbing someone else by the throat, and demanding they repay me for what they owe me.

When God has wiped the slate clean of all I owe him and lavished on me on his waterfall of grace, mercy, blessing and forgiveness.

So okay, old enemies. I grab you by the throat and chuck you into the waterfall. May God bless you as he blesses me, forgive you as he forgives me, and deal with you as he deals with me.

Asking God to do anything but bless is asking him to go against his nature, because he is a God of mercy and compassion, slow to judgement, abounding in steadfast love.

¹⁷Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! ¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:¹⁹that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. 2 Cor 5:17

Saul Bellow’s autobiographical account of breaking through writers’ block

By Anita Mathias

Saul Bellow’s autobiographical account of breaking through writers’ block with the creation of Augie March.

My first thought was that I must get rid of the hospital novel—it was poisoning my life. And next I recognized that this was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant. This bitterness of mine was intolerable, it was disgraceful, a symptom of slavery. I think I’ve always been inclined to accept the depressions that overtook me and I felt just now that I had allowed myself to be dominated by the atmosphere of misery or surliness, that I had agreed somehow to be shut in or bottled up. I seem then to have gone back to childhood in my thoughts and remembered a pal of mine whose surname was August—a handsome, breezy, freewheeling kid who used to yell out when we were playing checkers, “I got a scheme!” He lived in the adjoining building and we used to try to have telephone conversations with tin cans connected by waxed grocery string. His father had deserted the family, his mother was, even to a nine-year-old kid, visibly abnormal, he had a strong and handsome older brother. There was a younger child who was retarded—a case of Down syndrome, perhaps—and they had a granny who ran the show. (She was not really the granny; she’d perhaps been placed there by a social agency that had some program for getting old people to take charge of broken families.) Now, just what had happened to handsome, cheerful Chuckie and to his brothers, his mother, and the stranger whom they called granny? I hadn’t seen anything of these people for three decades and hadn’t a clue. So I decided to describe their lives. This came on me in a tremendous jump. Subject and language appeared at the same moment. The language was immediately present—I can’t say how it happened, but I was suddenly enriched with words and phrases. The gloom went out of me and I found myself with magical suddenness writing a first paragraph.

I was too busy and happy to make any diagnoses or to look for causes and effects. I had the triumphant feeling that this is what I had been born for. I pushed the hospital manuscript aside and began immediately to write in a spirit of reunion with the kid who had shouted, “I got a scheme!” It poured out of me. I was writing many hours every day. In the next two years I seldom looked into Fowler’s “Modern English Usage.”

Perhaps I should also add that it has been a lifelong pattern with me to come back to strength from a position of extreme weakness: I had been almost suffocated and then found that I was breathing more deeply than ever.

It was enormously exhilarating to take liberties with the language. I said what I pleased and I didn’t hesitate to generalize wildly and to invoke and dismiss epochs and worlds. For the first time I felt that the language was mine to do with as I wished.

In writing “Augie March,” I was trying to do justice to my imagination of things. I can’t actually remember my motives clearly, but I seem to have been reacting against confinement in a sardine can and evidently felt I had failed to cope with some inner demands. Reading passages from “Augie,” I seem to recognize some impulse to cover more ground, to deal with hundreds if not thousands of combined impressions. To my cold octogenarian eye, it seems overblown now, but I recognize nevertheless that I was out to satisfy an irrepressible hunger for detail. The restraint of the first two books had driven me mad—I hadn’t become a writer to tread the straight and narrow. I had been storing up stuff for years and this was my dream opportunity for getting it all out. I was also up to my eyes in mental debt. By this I mean that in becoming a writer I hoped to bring out somehow my singular reactions to existence. Why else write? I had prepared and overprepared myself by reading, study, and fact-storage or idea-storage and I was now trying to discharge all this freight. Paris (Europe) may have set me off. I didn’t actually understand what had happened during the Second World War until I had left the U.S.A. I now seem to have been struck by the shame of having written my first book under Marxist influence. In 1939, I had seen the Second World War as a capitalist imperialist war, like the First World War. My Partisan Review Leninist friends (especially Clem Greenberg [Clement Greenberg, the art critic]) had sold me on this. Even in writing “The Victim” I had not yet begun to understand what had happened to the Jews in the Second World War. Much of “Augie” was for me the natural history of the Jews in America. The Jews in Germany, Poland, Hungary, French Jews, Italian Jews had been deported, shot, gassed. I must have had them in mind in the late forties, when I wrote “Augie.”

Every morning when I walked to my rented workroom I stopped to watch the municipal workers who turned on the water for the daily street wash. In the streets there was just slope enough to sluice the gutters, and watching the flow of water between the curb and the barrier of wet burlap gave me the only ease I was getting on those gray days, and the release that came with this was inexplicably verbal in form. I was not much interested in explaining this transfer from fluidity and low sparkle to . . . well, to polyglot versatility. I discovered that I could write whatever I wished, and that what I wished was to get into words the appearance of a gallery of personalities—characters like Grandma Lausch or Einhorn the fertile cripple, or Augie March himself. Years of notation ended in the discovery of a language that made everything available.

A language might be restrictive or it might be expansive. An excess of corrections caused shrinking. Philip Roth puts it well when he speaks of the teeming, dazzling “specifics” in the opening pages of “Augie March.” These specifics were not deliberately accumulated for some future release. They were revealed by the language. They represent the success of an unconscious strategy. You might put it that Mr. Einhorn had been in hock for years; for decades. He and I together had been waiting for an appropriate language. By that language and only that language could he be redeemed. I couldn’t have been aware of this development. It was not an invention; it was a discovery.

The novel I now began to write wrote itself: “I am an American, Chicago-born.” The narrator was a boyhood friend whom I had lost track of thirty years ago, when my family had moved from Augusta Street. I often wondered what had become of this handsome impulsive kid. The book I found myself writing was therefore a speculative biography.

There was something deeply unsatisfactory about the language used by contemporary writers—it was stingy and arid, it was not connected with anything characteristic, permanent, durable, habitual in the writer’s outlook. For as long as I could remember I identified body and limbs, faces and their features, with words, phrases, and tones of voice. Language, thought, belief were connected somehow with noses, eyes, brows, mouths, hair—legs, hands, feet had their counterparts in language. The voice—the voices—were not invented. And whether they knew it or not all human creatures had voices and ears and vocabularies—sometimes parsimonious, sometimes limitless and overflowing. In this way the words and the phenomena were interrelated. And this was what it meant to be a writer.

Saul Bellow’s autobiographical account of breaking through writers’ block

By Anita Mathias

Saul Bellow’s autobiographical account of breaking through writers’ block with the creation of Augie March.

I seem then to have gone back to childhood in my thoughts and remembered a pal of mine whose surname was August—a handsome, breezy, freewheeling kid who used to yell out when we were playing checkers, “I got a scheme!” He lived in the adjoining building and we used to try to have telephone conversations with tin cans connected by waxed grocery string. His father had deserted the family, his mother was, even to a nine-year-old kid, visibly abnormal, he had a strong and handsome older brother. There was a younger child who was retarded—a case of Down syndrome, perhaps—and they had a granny who ran the show. (She was not really the granny; she’d perhaps been placed there by a social agency that had some program for getting old people to take charge of broken families.) Now, just what had happened to handsome, cheerful Chuckie and to his brothers, his mother, and the stranger whom they called granny? I hadn’t seen anything of these people for three decades and hadn’t a clue. So I decided to describe their lives.

This came on me in a tremendous jump. Subject and language appeared at the same moment. The language was immediately present—I can’t say how it happened, but I was suddenly enriched with words and phrases. The gloom went out of me and I found myself with magical suddenness writing a first paragraph.

Reading passages from “Augie,” I seem to recognize some impulse to cover more ground, to deal with hundreds if not thousands of combined impressions.

To my cold octogenarian eye, it seems overblown now, but I recognize nevertheless that I was out to satisfy an irrepressible hunger for detail. The restraint of the first two books had driven me mad—I hadn’t become a writer to tread the straight and narrow.

I had been storing up stuff for years and this was my dream opportunity for getting it all out. I was also up to my eyes in mental debt. By this I mean that in becoming a writer I hoped to bring out somehow my singular reactions to existence. Why else write? I had prepared and overprepared myself by reading, study, and fact-storage or idea-storage and I was now trying to discharge all this freight. Paris (Europe) may have set me off. I didn’t actually understand what had happened during the Second World War until I had left the U.S.A. I now seem to have been struck by the shame of having written my first book under Marxist influence. In 1939, I had seen the Second World War as a capitalist imperialist war, like the First World War. My Partisan Review Leninist friends (especially Clem Greenberg [Clement Greenberg, the art critic]) had sold me on this. Even in writing “The Victim” I had not yet begun to understand what had happened to the Jews in the Second World War. Much of “Augie” was for me the natural history of the Jews in America. The Jews in Germany, Poland, Hungary, French Jews, Italian Jews had been deported, shot, gassed. I must have had them in mind in the late forties, when I wrote “Augie.”

Alain de Botton and the creation of new genres

By Anita Mathias

I love Alain de Boton’s books, especially his ones on Proust, Philosophy, and Travel and here’s a cogent statement of what his literary goals are in an excerpt from an interview.
Cool, I love these new genres. Essayellas!!

Writerspace: How would you like us to remember Alain de Botton and what message or advice would you like us to retain?
Alain: I’d like to be remembered as someone who had a shot at trying out a kind of essayistic writing, which blended the personal and the philosophical, in search of practical answers for how to deal with the problems of everyday life.

Alain de Botton and the creation of new genres

By Anita Mathias

Helen Roseveare’s Great Questions–Is it worth it? Is Jesus Christ worth it?

By Anita Mathias

I love this story I quote verbatim:

“Her name is Helen Roseveare. Helen Roseveare grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Helen Roseveare became a skilled surgeon. All her life, both before and after she came to Christ, and she came to Christ during her university days, Helen Roseveare had a motto. And her motto was in the form of a question, and the question was this: “Is it worth it?” Is it worth it? And she would ask and honestly answer that question before she did anything. Before she went out on a day with a guy, she would say, “Is it worth it?” Before she would buy a book at Barnes and Noble and read it, she’d say, “Is it worth it?” Before she took a course in college, she’d say, “Is it worth it?”

And by asking and answering that question honestly, she became a very well-educated, disciplined, young woman physician. And after she graduated from Cambridge and got her hospital training, she gave her life to the Lord for missionary service in the northeast corner of the Belgian Congo in the community of Nobobongo. And she served their in the fifties and sixties eleven solid years of sacrificial, loving service to the African people. She did leprosy work, children’s work, built a hospital, built a Bible school. And then, in 1956… in 1964, in 1964 the Simba Uprising took place in the Congo, what we here in distant America called the Congo Rebellion. And the tribal people rose up, and the foreigners were ruthlessly treated.

Now – and Helen Roseveare went through that. Now I didn’t know anything about that, I did’t know anything about her, and I’ll never forget the first time I met her. I was a guest teacher for ten weeks at Columbia Bible College in South Carolina. My wife and I and our four kids were living in the men’s dorm in two dorm rooms that they put together in a makeshift little apartment for us. We were living there for ten weeks while I taught several courses in the school. And one night at nine o’clock at night, word came through the men’s dormitory that all the men were to leave their studies, and to go to the central lobby, because a woman missionary was passing through campus that evening, she couldn’t stay for the next day, and so they wanted the men to hear her give a brief word of testimony about her missionary work in Africa.

Well, to be real honest with you, none of the boys were very excited, you know. And, but the school said they had to do it, so we all went to the main lobby of the men’s dorm, and when we got there, the guys were in there, they were draped over the couches, sitting on the floor, and kind of looking like they didn’t want to be there. And, and then two of the school administrators walked in with Dr. Roseveare standing between the them, and when we saw her, everybody’s worst fears were well-founded, because she looked like a missionary. Whatever that means.

Simple cotton dress. Gray hair pulled back in a bit of a bun. Very thick, coke-bottle glasses, because her eyesight was not good. And she was tired. So somebody grabbed a gray, folding, metal Samsonite chair and put it in the middle of the floor, and, and, and she sat on it, and they said, ah, “Gentlemen, this woman, Dr. Roseveare, has just come through our campus, we just want her to share a little bit of her experience with you tonight.” And so she started to give her testimony. And being the astute woman that she is, about two minutes into her testimony, she knew that most of those guys were not interested at all, and so she stopped.

And she said, “You know what, boys, I don’t want to bore you with the details of my life. You’ve probably heard different stories and so forth. So, it’s late, why don’t we just take another five, ten minutes or so and, and I’ll just answer questions. Maybe, you know, you have a question, I’d rather talk about the things you’re interested.” And this kid immediately stuck his hand up, I feel sorry for him to this day, he stuck his hand up, and he said, he said, “Yeah I’ve got a question,” he said, “You know, we’ve got missionaries coming through here all the time, and, and they’re always talking about, you know, paying the price and suffering for Jesus – what did you ever suffer for Jesus?” She sat there and looked at him and, without any bitterness or any anger, she said, “Well, during the Simba Uprising, I was raped twice.” Everything got real quiet.

And then she told us about the rape. She told us how the government soliders came to her bungalow that night, came inside, ransacked it, grabbed her, beat her, threw her to the floor, kicked in all of her teeth. And then two army officers, one at a time, took her to her own bedroom and violated her body by raping her. And then, after the second incident, she was dragged from that bungalow out into a clearing and tied to a tree. And standing around the tree were all the laughing government soldiers. And then, while she was standing there, beaten and humiliated and violated and ridiculed, someone discovered in the bungalow the only existing hand-written manuscript of a book that she had been writing about the Lord’s work in the Congo over an eleven year period. They brought it out, put it on the ground in front of her, and burned it.

And as she saw that book go up in smoke, through clenched teeth, she said to herself: “Is it worth it? Is it really worth it? Eleven years of my life poured out in selfless service for the African people and now this.” And then she told those boys in that dormitory room that night as we all sat there spellbound, she said, “And boys, the minute I said that, God’s Holy Spirit settled over that terrible scene, and He began to speak to me, and this is what He said. He said to me: ‘Helen, my daughter Helen, you’ve been asking the wrong question all your life. Helen, the question is not, “Is it worth it?” The question is: “Am I worthy?” Am I, the Lord Jesus who gave His life for you, worthy for you to make this kind of sacrifice for me?'” And by her own tearful testimony she told us how God broke her heart, she looked up into the face of Jesus and said, “Oh Lord Jesus, yes, it is worth it, for thou art worthy.”

Elisabeth Elliot, whose husband was one of the five men who died trying to reach the Auca Indians, has written a very interesting chapter in a book entitled, “The Unfinished Task.” I tried to get them to stock it at the book table here for this conference but unfortunately, it’s out of print, you can find it in a, in a library, maybe in this church library. “The Unfinished Task,” and in there she’s written a chapter entitled, “Reflections on the Death of Five Missionaries.” And she asks and answers three questions. Number one: Were they called? Number two: Did they obey? And number three: Was it worth it? And in answer to that last question – was it worth it – this is what she writes, Elisabeth Elliot, listen carefully, she said this:

“Finally, was it worth it? Does it make sense that five men with those kinds of qualifications should die for the sake of sixty people? By whose standards can we answer that question? Well, we say, lots of Auca Indians got saved. I’ve heard stories of thousands of volunteers to the mission field. I’m not sure if they’re there today. I know there are some. People everywhere tell me they were moved and changed by the story. Hundreds of young men have told me that the book, ‘The Shadow of the Almighty,’ has changed their lives. I don’t deny that for a moment. Suppose it’s all true – does that make it worth it? Let’s suppose for a moment that not one Auca Indian got saved, that not one person ever heard the story of those five men, let alone was changed by it. Would it be worth it?”

And then she continues to write, “Yes!” She writes, “Yes!” “Why?” she writes, “Because the results of my obedience to God are the business of God almighty who is sovereign. It is the love of Christ which constrains us. There is no other motive for missionary service that will survive the blows of even the first year. We do it for Him.”

* * *

Advice from Helen Roseveare: Above all else, keep the daily quiet time apart with God. Let nothing squeeze this out of your timetable. This is where you grow, where he can teach and change you into his likeness: where he can speak to you, direct you, encourage you, and where he maintains the spirituality of your service. Paul said: ‘pray continually’ (NIV) ‘without ceasing’ (AV) (1Thes 5:17).

Does this sound impractical? Beware! It is scriptural – and the Lord knows just how busy you are! The busier you are, the more you need to pray. We have to learn to use all the spare moments, and to bring everything to God in prayer. There is nothing too small or insignificant to bring to him in prayer. Talk everything over with the Lord – the disappointments, problems and joys. We can pray as we scrub up, as we wait for the traffic lights to change, as we peel the potatoes.

“Let me Get Home Before Dark,” by J. Robertson McQuilkin: A Prayer to Finish Well

By Anita Mathias

LET ME GET HOME BEFORE DARK

by J. Robertson McQuilkin

It’s sundown, Lord.
The shadows of my life stretch back
into the dimness of the years long spent.
I fear not death, for that grim foe betrays himself at last,
thrusting me forever into life:
Life with you, unsoiled and free.
But I do fear.
I fear the Dark Spectre may come too soon –
or do I mean, too late?
That I should end before I finish or
finish, but not well.
That I should stain your honor, shame your name,
grieve your loving heart.
Few, they tell me, finish well…
Lord, let me get home before dark.

The darkness of a spirit
grown mean and small, fruit shriveled on the vine,
bitter to the taste of my companions,
burden to be borne by those brave few who love me still.
No, Lord. Let the fruit grow lush and sweet,
A joy to all who taste:
Spirit-sign of God at work,
stronger, fuller, brighter at the end.
Lord let me get home before dark.

The darkness of tattered gifts,
rust-locked, half-spent or ill-spent.
A life that once was used of God
now set aside.
Grief for glories gone or
Fretting for a task God never gave.
Mourning in the hollow chambers of memory.
Gazing on the faded banners of victories long gone.
Cannot I run well unto the end?
Lord, let me get home before dark.

The outer me decays –
I do not fret or ask reprieve.
The ebbing strength but weans me from mother earth
and grows me up for heaven.
I do not cling to shadows cast by immortality.
I do not patch the scaffold lent to build the real, eternal me.
I do not clutch about me my cocoon,
vainly struggling to hold hostage
a free spirit pressing to be born.

But will I reach the gate
in lingering pain, body distorted, grotesque?
Or will it be a mind
wandering untethered among light phantasies or
grim terrors?
Of your grace, Father, I humbly ask…
Let me get home before dark.

-as printed in the Spring, 1989 Columbia Bible College & Seminary Quarterly

Archives for 2010

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