This weekend Grace Presbyterian Church is hosting an art exhibit for Advent which will feature portraiture, pyrography and music. If you’re in the area, please stop by to take it in. Pieces will be installed each week and will walk us towards, Bethlehem and the Nativity.

Here’s the flyer for the exhibit.

As the exhibit artists present their work, I will be preaching on each of the themes. This poem is based on the first subject of the Advent theme of “Hope”.

If helpful, you may listen to me read the poem via the player below.

Where are you,
My enfolding twin, one who for me
Fits in embrace, who entwined and enmeshed
Completes, in coupling makes he and she,
Who is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh?

Where are you,
Who ever-present, hides, is unseen,
Who forbids one thing, though all things are good,
Gives all for food, yet forbids we glean
What delights our eyes, what we want, would?

Where are you?
We wait blushing, trying to hide
From seeing as is, not as we would be;
In enmity, driven, cast from your side,
Wrapped in self-making, clothed in your tree’s leaves?

Where are you,
My image: father-husband, mother-wife?
What bleak breeze blew, moved you to take
The forbidden fruit, eat, gamble your life,
And the lives of you children forsake?

Where are you?
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?
My Father, I thirst, drink for her the cup,
For your love obey, for her take the tree
That my bride ‘neath my love may eat and sup.

Here we are Lord,
Taken by he who takes us in hand,
Whose hands hold all things, WHO IS, I AM.
We hold to nothing, make no demand.
We are here. Do your will. Work your plan.

© Randall Edwards 2017
artwork: John Roddam Spencer Stanhope [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons