This a sonnet about the anxiety and resentment. Generally speaking, anxiety is living in future — a reality about which you may have desires, but ultimately have no power to ensure. Resentment, on the other hand, is living in the past where wounds and regrets have occurred, and they gain controlling power over our present. Failure to live by faith in the present often leads to anxiety and resentment. Professor Harold Hill summed it up nicely, “You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.”

If it’s helpful, you may listen to me read the sonnet via the player below.

Anxious, I live my life in the future
Where I dream my present away,
Drinking my fantasies unto a stupor,
Consuming my plans at a stress buffet.

Resentful, my life is stuck in the past
Where the hair-triggered gun of trauma smokes,
And its wound of shame and contempt outlasts
Any zeal that love’s flame may stoke.

As a fool I’ve fretted my life away,
Bled out my days in wasted emotion,
Dying where l lie in Almost’s alley way—
A waste of years, a death in slow motion.

Looking o’er this ruin will I ever see
The years the locust have stolen from me?

© Randall Edwards 2018.
This poem is for Christ’s church. If it is helpful, please feel free to copy or reprint in church bulletins, read aloud, or repost. I only ask that an attribution be cited to myself (Randall Edwards) and this blog (backwardmutters.com). Thanks.

Artwork: The Prophet Joel
By James Tissot (1836-1902), French painter (http://www.gci.org/files/images/jt/TissJoel.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons