Reconciling Home and Here

How odd in this academic refuge

To suddenly think of you

In these corridors of logic

Faith is the profane word

Instead—technical and rational

Are the mortar anchoring the wall

So that curled here and hiding

Hoping you won’t see

We’ve erected again our idols

Turned from you in our humanity

I think I wrote this about a year after I returned to Jesus. I was sitting in class proctoring an anatomy exam. I had no papers to grade so I was thinking about the worship jam session I was going to later that night. Someone would pick a chord progression, and we would all go with it, taking turns leading as the Spirit led us. I began talking to God, quietly in my head and then looked up to watch my students. The juxtaposition of prayer in a science classroom at the higher levels of academia seemed very odd. I had spent over a decade of college in anthropology and biology, two areas where God is notably absent. Well, He's there, but not acknowledged in any honoring sort of way. As I sat there this poem began to rise in my head so I started to write to pass the time.

Struggling with my mind's lifetime insistence on control and answers has been one of the biggest things I've had to work on releasing as I search for those deeper more intimate places in God. I've always been a thinker and arguer. When someone says, "This just is so accept it," my knee jerks, and I have to go off on my own and bullhead my way to my own answer, even when it's often the same answer. You get a lot of bruises that way. But, for now at least, it's the only way I know to be. I am a lot better at not arguing with God (good thing I'm thinking), but people, well that will still need some "dying to self."