Jesus came to my house

Another imaginative worshipful challenge from Iain. Many of us at wgnc have written about Jesus coming to our house. Here's my offering.

Jesus came to my house today. I really wish he hadn’t. Don’t misunderstand me I desperately wanted to meet him. Its just I’d rather have gone along to an evening at someone else’s house, a kind of fireside chat, some selected friends and, wow, Jesus would be our guest!

But he wanted to come to my house and said so publicly. Why did I climb the bus shelter to get a good view of Him? All the way from Byres Road we traipsed to my house, everyone and Jesus, every hanger-on.

I must admit the days have passed so pleasantly and peacefully even with everyone around, so many visitors! So many people I don’t know and yet I have become host and slightly hostage. I’m captive and captivated.

I don’t know how He does it. Everybody’s name He knows, and the conversations! It should be startling and set us on edge but you know the way he knows all about you? He says exactly the right thing to everyone every time. Even through the window to people outside in the rain.

I’m not stressing, but get this, every time my wife Shirley and I go to the fridge for supplies as yet more guest arrive, it remains provisioned. It hasn’t expanded Tardis-like. It just has an undiminished abundance. We have wine, of course, pouring out of vases, bottles and plastic cups.

Sometimes He just looks you in the eye. Smiles gently and sweetly. I can’t articulate the energy and rush of feeling this gives. Not goose bumps, more like an inner earthquake. So much said without words. He laughs a lot too! With us never at us.

I opened my bedroom curtains the next morning and there were three tents in my front garden. I waited 20 minutes for a homeless family to finish using the bathroom. I hadn’t seen my own children yet. When I did there was my son is sitting on His knee. The stories He can tell! Everyone was spellbound.

He did some dishes with me and then helped Shirley hang out some washing and without warning said He needed to go.

I gushed out a declaration that I would give half of all I had to the poor and repay all my rotten debts to everybody I’d wronged. I didn’t meant to, it just was drawn out of me like a long withheld breath. Yet I feel it rung true and I can do it.

He smiled beatifically and said “salvation comes to this house today.” I really, really think it has. I wondered, momentarily about following, dropping everything, but it didn’t feel that was what He wanted. I left it unsaid. I was still looking out the living room window hours after He and all the followers had gone. I remember Him looking back, straight back at me, smiling, crying, praying all at once it seemed.

The phone rang, my anxious boss wondering why I wasn’t at work. “I’m sorry,” I said, “ Jesus was here, is here, He came, he really came, and.…I’m alright now.”
“Right so you’re coming back today then?”
“ No I’m all right, all right, everything! Totally everything, its just …”
“What!”
“Its not like a funny turn or anything, its just, well I’m not coming back!”

An iphone poet

Looks like new tech is recultivating the old art of poetry, or maybe just making it feel easy and accessible. Here's an offering of iphone poetry from blogger Michael Toy

iphone-poetry-from-university-ave

Random IM verse #2

A jammed printer
shouting swearing obscenities
not usually heard in the office
wasn’t the real distraction
instead for those with eyes to see
maybe the tautness of my face
victim of exposure to the harshness of the sun
I forced myself to breathe deeply,
sucking air into my lungs
to blow the printer and monster away

but to no avail
just mere breath can't change things
or can it?

What words can move mountains?
Empty phrases surely?
Can they really?
Change the world?

Lapsing back into the tyrannical tedium
I 'cancel print job'