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A seep of exhausted tears on the way home from work today...

Am I enough? I often wonder. Have I done enough?
These are lying questions, I know, knowing God, but there you are (there I am).

I am reading Ezekial lately. I find comfort in his vision of the cherubim in the presence of the Lord. Covered on all sides in eyes -- to apprehend all of God's glory? all of human suffering?

This is a mystery to me. I am stunned by both.

Another mystery to me, and another comfort: all of God's glory weeping out in all of human suffering...

Christ crucified.
Enough.

Where’s the scrawl?

you ask. How do you cover it all? I reply. --Sarah Harmer


So many moments.

Just hard to hold to, scrubbed down by nightshifts, mind polished smooth as the ballroom floor in this renovated office building. Conscience restless as the people out there on the floor, tossing and turning in the air-conditioned hum of nearly 4 a.m.

One of our beautiful boys came in tonight with nothing on him but a pieced-together crack pipe. Nothing else to his name these days.

Another boy got a job and brought everybody two flats of doughnuts, which we crowed over and feasted on.

"Good-night, shelter parents," says another as he heads to his mat.


And the girls, the girls are women who follow these boys...

One craving apples in her first trimester.
Another with a tiny daughter in ICU, born just this week.
Yet another, eight months pregnant, whose shirt reads Future Development -- an arrow pointing to her tummy!

rue and gladness

western meadow rue and wild ripe strawberries,
both in the fields and ditches close to home.

meanwhile, back at the ranch...

A month here already? The aerial view, brown velvet and biege cuordory fields, has shifted to green ground I like hiking with Josh, and I am breathing poplar fuzz.

Driving to work I see whole fields of dandelion fluff lit up by big Alberta skies.

At work I do the rounds, count off kids sleeping on blue vinyl mats, bare feet scarred by Edmonton concrete and cocaine. Crystal meth, too, bites open wounds in people's faces and feet.

One guy came in late last night, said he'd got lost in the gospel of Mark and read chapter after chapter, circling the inner city bus route a few times as he willed the words of Jesus to fill him on the inside. He's sick of filling himself with liquor.

His memory's a garden, everything rooting.

"You know, if good seed finds good soil," he said, "the fruit will be thirty, sixty, even a hundred times as much!"