Dec 3: remember

Remember that day?

When I served you breakfast and we talked?

You told me about your music.

How you mix songs on your notepad.

You said, with sadness, your guitar was pawned.

I wondered if, in my gift of time and service,

I was entertaining an angel unawares.

(As if serving God’s image bearer was not enough)

Remember that day months later?

On Main Street during COVID,

We chatted and you said you were 40 days clean.

You in your cargo shorts, your days of scruff,

Your tattered backpack and manic pace.

I pulled my old guitar from the trunk of my car

And gave it to you.

Between stories of demon possession and faith-sharing adventures,

You played a tune, an old gospel song,

With raw and rare abandon

From the recesses of your youth.

I remember that day.

My confusing cauldron of emotion

From passing on a gift of 30 years gone by.

A gift imbued with meaning but one

That had sat too long unplayed, unloved.

Its embrace and song brought warmth and joy

And cautious hope of more.

Hope it wouldn’t turn

To pawn shop currency for the next hit

But rather life and breath and song.

And, if I’m honest, there was not a little pride

In my sacrifice for your salvation,

In being Jesus with skin on, to you that day.

(Oh how that phrase makes me cringe)

And I think I got it wrong.

I remembered that day

It’s the other way around.

What I did for you the brother of Christ

I did for him.

I remembered that day.

That day

I wasn’t Jesus

And you were.

And you are.

_________________________________

From Dan's book: Listen to Your Life: a year of poetic pondering