There are some thoughts that do not begin as words.
They begin as a feeling.
A weight.
A question that refuses to leave.
This poem did not begin with a desire to write about the church, sinners, or judgment. It began with a disturbing thought:
Why do we fear the smell of someone else's brokenness when we have forgotten the smell of our own?
Somewhere along the way, many of us have learned how to clean the outside of the grave while forgetting that we were once buried inside it.
We know how to look the part.
We know how to say the right things.
We know when to stand, when to sit, when to bow our heads, and when to raise our hands.
We can wear the clothes.
We can speak the language.
We can even convince ourselves that we are far away from the darkness we once walked through.
But underneath all of it is a truth we do not like to remember:
We were all once standing in the same grave.
The first thought that came was the image of a grave.
Not because I wanted to write something dark just for the sake of darkness, but because the grave is honest.
The grave does not care about titles.
It does not care about your reputation.
It does not care how many verses you memorized, how many sermons you preached, or how clean your Sunday clothes looked.
The grave remembers what we try to forget.
It remembers that every human heart carries the same disease.
Sin.
Pride.
Brokenness.
A need for mercy.
The ground does not separate us.
We do.
Then came the thought about the smell.
A strange thought, but a powerful one.
A grave has a smell.
Death has a smell.
Decay has a smell.
And yet, spiritually, we spend so much of our lives trying to cover that smell.
We spray perfume over our wounds.
We cover our failures with religious language.
We hide our struggles behind smiles.
We learn how to look alive while something inside us is dying.
Sometimes we become so good at hiding that we forget we were ever broken.
That is the danger.
Not just sin.
But forgetting we needed saving.
The hardest part of this thought was realizing that the person we often reject is not always someone different from us.
Sometimes they are a reflection.
The addict.
The prisoner.
The person fighting a battle nobody sees.
The person whose mistakes are public while ours remain hidden.
We look at them and think:
"How could they fall that far?"
But maybe the better question is:
"How far would I have fallen if Grace had not found me?"
Because the distance between a pew and a prison cell is not always a measure of righteousness.
Sometimes it is simply a measure of mercy.
The Cross destroys our pride.
Because at the foot of the Cross, nobody gets to stand taller than anyone else.
The person in the expensive suit and the person wearing yesterday's clothes both need the same Savior.
The person with a clean history and the person carrying a lifetime of mistakes both need the same blood.
The person sitting in the church pew and the person sitting in a prison cell both need the same Grace.
Heaven saw no different need.
That thought is what began shaping this poem.
Because the Gospel is not that good people become better.
The Gospel is that dead people are made alive.
And before Christ called our name...
we were all breathing dust.
This poem became a mirror.
Not a weapon.
A mirror does not exist to show us how ugly someone else looks.
It exists to show us the truth about ourselves.
The question is not:
"Why is that person so broken?"
The question is:
"Why am I surprised that broken people need a Savior?"
Because the truth is painful:
The reason their darkness bothers us so much...
may be because it reminds us of the darkness Christ pulled us from.
So this is not a poem about them.
It is a poem about us.
It is about remembering.
Remembering the pit.
Remembering the chains.
Remembering the night when Mercy found us.
Because if we truly remember where we came from, we cannot look down on those still trying to find their way out.
The hands that lifted us from the grave are the same hands reaching for them.
Remember the Pit
There is a smell the grave remembers,
a whisper buried deep in time.
The earth keeps secrets in its chambers,
and holds the echoes of our crime.
The dust remembers every footstep,
the stone remembers every name.
Yet we, the breathing dead who wander,
forget from whence our souls first came.
We dress our wounds in Sunday clothing,
we hide our scars beneath our pride.
We speak of grace with polished voices,
while keeping mercy locked outside.
We perfume corruption with religion,
until we cannot smell decay.
We build our walls with holy language,
and keep the broken ones away.
Then through the doors comes one forgotten,
with chains that rattle in the night.
A soul exhausted, bruised, and shattered,
a candle struggling for the light.
He smells of prisons, pain, and failure.
She carries shame she cannot hide.
They bear the weight of fallen choices,
and we step back to guard our pride.
But why do we retreat in silence?
Why do we turn our eyes away?
Is it because they bear the darkness...
or because they show what we became?
Remember the pit.
Because the moment we forget the grave Christ pulled us from is the moment we begin building walls around the graves of others.
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