Aspiring Poet, heartfelt thoughts.I have Just Discovered that I can write

  There are thoughts that knock politely. This was not one of them. It came like something scratching from inside the walls—quiet at first, then persistent, until I could no longer pretend I had not heard it. My mind has always been an odd place to live. Schizophrenia has made some corridors darker than others, and there are days when even my own thoughts seem like strangers wandering through rooms I thought I knew. Yet sometimes, in that strange wilderness, a question appears that refuses to be dismissed. I was thinking about sinners. Not us. Them. That is how we usually think of it, isn't it? The sinner is always somewhere else. He is the addict. The prisoner. The man whose life has become a ruin. The woman whose past we whisper about. The one we hope Christ will save—provided their salvation does not require them to sit too close to us. And then the thought turned its pale face toward me: What if the worst sinner who ever lived is not someone history remembers, but the person st...

When the Light Reveals the Darkness What if God sometimes lets us see how dark the darkness is—not to make us fear it, but so that when He reveals the Light, we finally understand what we were blind to? I did not begin with the Cross. I began with a question about darkness. Not the darkness that falls when the sun disappears. Not the darkness of a room with the lights turned off. Something deeper. The kind of darkness a person can live inside without realizing he is there. Perhaps that is the most frightening thing about darkness: it does not always feel dark when you have lived in it long enough. We learn its shape. We adjust our eyes. We become comfortable with what we can no longer see. And eventually, we stop asking whether we are blind. We simply call what we see normal . Then I began to wonder: What happens when Light finally enters that darkness? Perhaps we expect the Light to make everything beautiful immediately. But what if it does the opposite first? What if the first thin...

  The Road Had Always Been There There are moments in life when the road ahead seems to vanish. Not because the road has ended. Not because there was never a way forward. But because the darkness has become so familiar that we begin to believe it is all there is. We stand in the middle of the unknown, looking into the distance, searching for something that will tell us where to place the next step. We ask questions that have no easy answers. We wrestle with silence. We wonder if we have wandered too far, if we have gone too deep, if perhaps the path we were meant to walk disappeared somewhere behind us. And in those moments, the hardest thing to accept is that sometimes the problem is not the absence of a path. Sometimes the problem is our ability to see it. The traveler in the night does not always need a new road. Sometimes he needs new eyes. There is something mysterious about the way God works. He does not always move the mountains we fear. He does not always remov...

  The Letter Without a Signature There are moments when the world grows quiet enough that even the smallest things seem eager to speak. Not with voices, but with presence. The hush of an ancient forest. The patient rhythm of a river polishing stone. The wind wandering through the branches as though it remembers a path older than memory itself. The stars kindling one by one over the horizon, each arriving without haste, as if eternity has never learned the meaning of urgency. Many see only the mechanics of these things, and there is beauty in understanding how they work. But I often find myself wondering whether understanding how is only the beginning of a far greater question. My schizophrenic mind has always wandered into places that others might never think to visit. It asks questions that cannot be measured and notices patterns that invite reflection. I've learned that not every thought should be accepted simply because it appears, but I have also learned not to dismiss every m...

  What in nature appears insignificant only because it moves on a timescale I rarely notice? That question found me before I had an answer. I wasn't looking for philosophy. I wasn't searching for theology. I was simply watching the world outside my window and wondering how much of life I miss because I insist on measuring it by my own clock. We celebrate what blooms overnight and mourn what fades too quickly. We measure success in weeks, healing in months, and dreams in years. Nature seems uninterested in any of it. A tree doesn't rush toward the sky. Moss doesn't compete with the oak. Roots disappear deeper into the earth long before anyone notices the branches reaching upward. Maybe that is why forests feel ancient. They refuse to hurry. It occurred to me that perhaps what I call stillness is simply movement unfolding on a timescale I have never learned to see. A fallen tree appears lifeless, yet beneath its bark another world awakens. Fungi weave unseen th...

  "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." — Psalm 90:12 Some thoughts begin as a sentence. Others begin as a wound. And some begin in the quiet places of life, when God takes an ordinary moment and suddenly opens our eyes to something we have been too busy to see. This thought came to me with a simple sentence: "There is a last time you will do everything." At first, that thought feels heavy. Almost painful. Because when you really stop and think about it, every one of us has a list of moments that will only happen once. There will be a last time you pick up your child. A last time you hear your mother's voice call your name. A last time your father walks through the door. A last conversation with someone you love before they become a memory you carry. The difficult part is that we rarely know when those moments are happening. Life does not stop and whisper, "Pay attention. This is the last time." There is no warning...

A Mothers Hands Memory has fashioned a thousand phantom hands, and every one of them disappears the moment I reach to hold them. They haunt the quiet chambers of my heart, where a mother's touch once silenced every storm. I search the shadows for the warmth I knew, but find only echoes wearing her name. The years have stolen the sound of her footsteps, the earth has hidden the hands that held mine, and the cruel silence of the grave whispers that I must learn to live without them. Yet death has forgotten one eternal truth— it can bury the hand, but never the love that shaped the soul. For beyond the veil stands the One whose hands were pierced by love itself, holding every tear, every memory, every prayer. And one day, when graves surrender their secrets, the hands I have searched for in the darkness will no longer be phantoms— but a mother's hands reaching for me again in the light where sorrow cannot enter.               ...

  The Funerals No One Sees (A reflection on the graves we carry, the courage to share our wounds, and the faith that still dances) “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me...” Psalm 23:4  There are some words that sit quietly inside of us for years. Not because we do not believe them. Not because they do not matter. But because they came from places too deep to easily explain. Sometimes the hardest things to share are not the moments when we broke down in front of everyone. It is the things that broke inside where nobody could see. This is one of those thoughts. I wrote this a long time ago, but I never had the courage to share it. It sat quietly, like so many things we carry, waiting for the moment when I was ready to let someone else see it. Maybe that is because some truths feel too vulnerable when they are still close to the wound. But sometimes God takes the very thing we tried to hide and turns...

The Thief We Welcome "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."   Psalm 90:12  Some thoughts are born from hours of study. Others are born in the middle of an ordinary moment when God causes you to see something you have overlooked your entire life. That is how this thought came to me. Tonight, I was talking with my daughter. It was just a normal conversation, one of those moments we often take for granted. But somewhere in the middle of that conversation, a thought entered my mind that I could not shake: Time is the only thief everyone welcomes. The more I thought about it, the more unsettling it became. Because it is true. We spend our lives protecting the things we own. We lock our doors. We guard our possessions. We insure our homes. We protect our treasures. But there is one thief that never has to sneak in. One thief that never has to break a window. One thief that we invite into our lives every morning. We call him Time . We hang cloc...

  "Heaven is filled with people religion missed." That was the first thought. It was not meant to be a poem. It was not even meant to be a complete sentence. It was simply a thought that settled deep in my heart. Because when I look through Scripture, I see something that should humble every one of us. The people Jesus reached were not always the people religion expected. The thief hanging beside Him on the cross was not a man anyone would have chosen. He had no time left to prove himself. No time to clean up his past. No time to rebuild his reputation. He had only a broken heart and a desperate plea. And Jesus saw him. Religion would have seen a criminal. Christ saw someone worth dying for. That thought became the first stone in the foundation of this poem. Religion Sees the Sin. Christ Sees the Soul. The next thought came from something I have wrestled with in my own life. How often do we look at people and only see what is broken? We see the addiction. We s...