This is something that is born out of three years of serving in the rural North Carolina and is dedicated to all pastors who faithfully hold lives entrusted to them in their hands.

Holding in My Hands

They come to me and place

Their lives like broken toys

Into my hands and look expectantly

With that child-like faith hoping

For some magic glue that will make

All things as they have been

Before, no better than they’ve been.

And they fervently empty their pockets

Of the secrets they never knew they had

Some, deliriously for the seventy seventh time

Revisiting the dead who refuse to die

And the living who refuse to live

Telling me about them good old days

When their daddy used to go hunting

For squirrels because there was nothing to eat

And about the way cornbread tasted after

A long day in the tobacco fields

(Actually, nobody in their family

Of twelve ever smoked – Lord forbid! – but everybody

Loved the way tobacco smelled

When it was cured and dried and hung

In the barn over there at the edge of the field)

And the way he left for war

And she was left without him but with

Hope that one day he will return.

(And he did). And fifty, no, more,

Years of living together now dissolve

Like sugar in sweet ice tea

And they tell me about how

A truck ran the light and ran into

A car that the mother of their best friend

Drove without knowing to death (do we ever

Know the hour or the day?)

Or how, see those black ruins, where

The road bends right much

Once used to be a house where their cousin,

By law, lived and how the Lord

Brought him alive out of all that mess

(But he never was the same after that, was he?).

And how, Lord bless her heart, she

Used make the same pound cake for

Every function in the church until

She could no more – see how the fingers

Are knotted with life and years of work?

And they talk, forgetting all, forgetting everything,

Until slowly they don’t know anything

And sit – or lie – mumbling something

I will never know under their breath

Then we hold hands looking at each other

And I recognize the same child-like faith

Now taking their lives into our hands

Together we begin to pray into the day

When all things shall be well and

The manner of all things shall be well.