Shielding Grace

All the mothers around the world, around the seas rising high and the fires burning low, they all rock babies on a globe that spins on this axis of thin black letters.

We have Bibles at the table.

Pages of black letters, like long iron shafts, and around this the whole world goes around, spinning on His Story.

And I can hear it, how it turns after dinner, the children all turning Truth pages of Scripture around the table, pages skin thin, and we can see right through to the center.

This is my favorite book, Kai tells us this, clutching the Bible’s leather-bound pages tight, and that smile, and he wants to read Ephesians aloud to us.

My mama turns the pages of that special edition of the Four Holy Gospels, traces the illuminated letters, the art framing the masterpiece of His expression. Mama’s stilled.

After we clear the table, Levi belts his Bible right to his waist. He says this way he’ll always have it close. His Bible, it looks like a shield tied to him and I want one.

Joshua, he spends Sunday afternoon reading Unshaken, how Haiti quaked and God never moved, and I watch how he can’t stop turning the pages. Caleb says he wants to read it after Josh is done and I remember how we prayed through those days when the world seemed to implode. The Farmer calls me to come see images of Japan. I lay down my reading of Job, my book of common prayer.

I look at the pictures of Japan after the tsunami, of a curve of the planet smeared with this wave of ache, splintered wood piercing right into the earth. Women weep. Grieving can be prayer, the way we cry and know He hears.

I don’t see one photo of a broken heart.

How do broken hearts mend? Do some hearts heal all wrong, all twisted and crooked and weak?

What do we make of a world that needs remaking? There’s only one Crossbeam that promises a whole new world.

Only one Beam to line a heart up straight again, one Carpenter who can repair a torn-apart heart.

Levi’s on the couch, reading the gospel of Matthew.

And it’s here, even here, this slender pin at the center of the globe — that slides certain under the violently grinding plates and a surging ocean wall and all our fissured lives, and it’s the Word of the Word-God who took the shaft and keeps His promises and names Himself the Father of the Needy.

God has done that: put the poor man on the center stage in His story of compassion for the world.

The Farmer is lingering long over this photo — a man standing with his son in the midst of a wreckage of lumber and dreams and steel.

If I am moved but choose not to respond, won’t I soon harden, unable to respond?

When we are touched, we must reach out or soon we stiffen and nothing touches us and we feel nothing.

That Bible Levi is reading, it has these words, Jesus’ words. “Now that you know these things …”

Christian hands never clasp and He doesn’t give gifts for gain because a gift can never stop being a gift — it is always meant to be given. When we are grateful for His gifts, we give the gifts away because a gift never stops being a gift.

How will this planet change if God’s people do not become its change?

All afternoon I keep coming back to my study Bible.

I run my fingers along the Holy Writ, run my hands across the lines like groping along a ledge, looking for a crevice to grip in this world shook hard and wracked with pain.

I find it there, in His pierced-through hands …

And I hold on.

God, no matter when or where, Your Word is our sword against the pain of this world. And as I go out in the power of Your name, comfort me today with Your reassuring whisper that I am always safe in the strong protection of Your shielding grace.