winding the path

A couple of weekends ago I was away with a bunch of students from Liverpool Uni discussing church and what our dreams for the future might be. On the Sunday morning we had a 'scratch' worship service where different people prepared different parts of the worship - it was creative and insightful, pciking up many of the threads of discussion from the weekend. One of the things we'd discussed over the weekend was the concept of journeying with Jesus into the unknown, and one of the students, Tom, wrote the following poem for the worship...

The distant ocean sings to us,
we ebb, we flow,
Its waves beckon us.
And though we cannot see,
we feel its force tugging, pulling and luring us us in.

Our forethathers talk of the 'Great Drop',
how one by one, we rose out of the valleys, drumming up power,
gathering in size and pace,
pushing away the rocks,
before we powered over the cliffs.

For now the sun beats on our backs.
The current fuels our hearts,
though how easy it is to be consumed elsewhere,
to drift away from the others.
As the forces trap us,
forcing us into new channels.
As the vast lake encapsulates us
and we feel we're not travelling at all.

Ultimately we hold onto each other,
for the river always finds a path,
carving a way through the landscape of our time.
We may not share the force of our ancestors,
we may not be a flood of the nations,
but we live in promise, not hope,
for one day we all chance to swim amongst the oceans waves.

Thanks Tom for a great reflection (and for your permission to post it here!)

Malcolm C