Keep it in Your Way
I wanted to stagger em by bein the person I’d be staggered by but I didn’t do much thinking about who the people that stagger me are. They're not the vaguely approachable ones who like to let people know they’ve read a lot of books. Not the tortured ones who make their scars brighter than everyone else’s. Not the aloof ones who beg questions of themselves from the people they say they care about. I don’t know man. I’ve been all these things before. I’ve wanted to more fully become all these things before, but I been real lucky to have seen the wretchedness in the things I used to want.
Not to say I got any sort of goodness beyond the ordinary. Just that I’ve been blessed with a little more maturity, a little more clarity than I can take credit for. I’m starting to see what staggers me and I’m starting to love it better. I don’t know man. Here’s some thinking about that idea. Some people that have staggered me.
Hotbed summer, going into something familiar with a slightly better vantage point. It’s been long enough to see the ways you’ve changed my life. From the first, you were a host who cared more about me than you did about how I thought about your hosting. I have a lot of words I don’t share with anyone, but you were real easy to trust with those squishy parts of my soul. Gave my dormant vessel a place to lay its burden, and you loved the vessel and the burden. There’s no words for the warmth.
You helped me learn to care about stories. I used to say I didn’t care for stories, just what the stories meant. That’s stupid. Without the story, there is no meaning, and without caring about the story, you only get half the meaning. Missing out on an opportunity to care about something. You see things real beautifully. You got a vision that sees the peace in things and lets them live in their own beauty. You see stories for the peace they can breathe and the hope they make possible.
We talk about what’s loud a lot. We talk about the things that demand us without sustaining us. You know them like me, better than me. On the steps, you let me ramble like I do, and we looked for something nice as it started to rain. Even in the city, you can smell the rain over the construction. You can hear the wind over the engines. Over and over, I say I got a sadness, and over and over, you say it’ll never keep me from a stillness if I seek it. Thanks for helping me want to seek.
I don’t always remember your stories and stillness the way I should, and I’m sorry. I need to keep them in my way. Trip over them every chance I get until I learn to pick them up and carry them with me and eventually make them a part of me. Until then, I’ll keep them in my way. Lord please help me keep it in my way.
More than most, you know how much I love the night. The stars, the moon, the sounds, the chill. The forced slowness, the requisite patience. There are ways it reminds me of you. There’s a constancy to the night. It’s pious. It’s deep. It’s not so forthcoming. It’s got a loving mystery to it. I, quite pridefully, think I know what I’m getting from the night until it gives me another question to treasure. The night’s a masterpiece with a real stubborn front cover. But it’s humble. It’s quiet and it listens real well, even when it deserves to be heard.
I think of sunset, harbinger of the night, and that reminds me of you too. The sunset’s also quiet, but a bit more expressive than the night. Not quite as mysterious. Doesn’t need as much patience, particularity. But it’s painted with wisdom and it’s not something I’ll be able to forget. It teaches before it asks. You got a gift for both. Under sunsets, your patience is incredible.
Maybe that’s why I like the night so much. Reminds me of a lot of my favorite kind of people. But tonight reminds me of you cause it’s quiet and I feel like it’s got a lot to tell me. I’m trying to figure out how to listen well. The way you’ve always listened. Night-listening, sunset-listening. Night-caring, sunset-caring.
I listen and I care in my own strange way. I see myself in some nights. I won’t give myself the esteemed title of ‘nightlike’ because I don’t know if I deserve it. I am made of patience-testing questions and a bizarre streak of indeterminacy, but I’m learning to collect myself and listen. To direct my thinking and caring and shape my indeterminacy into something intelligible, slowly but truly.
Sometimes I don’t listen to the night and sometimes I forget to look at the sunset, and I apologize. I need to keep them in my way. Stub my toe every chance I get until I listen to you the way you’ve earned. Lord please help me keep it in my way.
Couldn’t tell you how we grew into what we are now. I remember bits and pieces of where we were and I can’t explain to anyone who isn’t us how different we used to be. I was a gloomy nonentity and you were a ball of frustration. And somehow you took the time to know me and care enough to see thru the haze I projected and toss me into a warmer, brighter place. Your goodness made me want to be good, which maybe the highest compliment I’ve ever given anybody before. You’ve earned better than that though. Better than me forgetting your birthday.
You got this look in your eyes when you’re in the middle of caring deeply. You look through whatever misgivings I might have and make them go somewhere else. You’ve got a presence. Whatever chairs we’re sitting across from each other on, whatever art surrounds us (homemade lamps, taxidermy salmon, your graffiti) there’s an element of home cause I know the way you care cause you make it so clear.
It’s late and I can’t pretend to have the right words. You’ve loved me so well. I can’t repay it, and I don’t feel like I’ve honored it well. I’m ashamed of that. I need to keep it in my way, so much better than I’ve done. Lord please help me keep it in my way.
God, I never understood why I was supposed to love you when I was young and careless. It felt silly. Like loving something I had no connection to. Like loving a concept, but one I couldn’t make any sense of. Not like loving math or nature. I think I thought of it as loving the reason that nature exists instead of the nature in front of me, which confused me because I wanted it to confuse me. Loving God means being accountable for living like it. It means recognizing that you owe a debt and humbling yourself enough to know you can’t pay it. It means you don’t get to love your own ideas as much as you used to.
The last one was hard for me. Partly because my own ideas made God responsible for making me love Him and doing the work of heart-changing and seeking for me. I figured that an all-powerful God could figure out what to do with me and things’d eventually fall into place or something. I’m not really sure what I thought, to be honest. I don’t think I did a lot of thinking. Almost no good thinking.
I’m learning what it means to love God. To want to love God. To want to seek and find and know and understand and be held. To be known and loved. It’s all very new. Very young. But there’s a kind of peace and a kind of love and a kind of reliance that I’m finding that’s entirely new. I don’t just see platitudes anymore.
But I feel like in a sense, God has kept me in his way. Not in the way I’ve talked about above, where I want to remind myself of the duty I have to honor the way people have cared about me over and over and over again because they deserve more remembering and more goodness than I’ve so far been able to give them. But in a different, more cosmic way. In the way my small self has been shepherded towards goodness despite the juvenile garbage that defined me for so long. Thank you for keeping me in your way, O God.
It’s ok to keep it quiet,
Please just keep me in your way.