Category Archives: Love

How Far Home?

Leave a reply

He wanders, lost in waking dreams,

The frozen ground grown concrete hard

Beneath his steady heartbeat tread.

At last he sees the place he knew –

There grew the man he has become –

But tossed upon the tides of time,

Neither it nor he are the same.

Recall the warmth of summer’s night,

Bedecked by flickered fires’ flames.

Remember now the gold-drenched dawn,

When morning’s light whispered your name

And bade you rise and play again,

Just as you did the day before.

And what is more, those faces see,

Those hearts that loved you then so well.

Is all now lost in memory?

A dull, long-dead, once-living scene?

Or does this dream bid you anew,

To look beyond what now is gone,

To that to come which cannot die,

Held fast in Him Who cannot lose?

How heavy is the joyous weight,

The glory that awaits you then!

Your home does not behind you lie,

But ahead.

The Empty Place

Leave a reply

Amid the festive smells, and bells

From the steeple sweetly chiming;

And as the winter’s cold silence

Warms the heart with expectation

Of the swift-set sun, and feasting

Together ‘round the banquet set,

I look to see an empty place

Where once your face, bright and beaming

With happiness, delighted all,

Delighted me.

                        But now you’re gone,

And I, beloved, feel the sting

Of days and weeks, of months and years,

Without your laughter, sans your sighs,

And harmless, confiding whispers.

–

The children sing of Christ the King –

At once my heart is stirred to see,

That ‘round another table set

We yet together eat and drink

The bread, the wine, for Christ is mine,

And yours, and we are ever His.

Until the shadows flee the earth,

And glory fills her like the sea –

Until the empty place is filled,

I’ll eat the Supper here, you there,

And wait, in love, to be renewed.

My tears may flow for now, I know,

But, even so, not forever.

Loving God with Augustine

Leave a reply

As you think on these words from Augustine’s Confessions, prayerfully seek a deeper love for God, a love inflamed in us by the fruit-producing work of His Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:22)! Pray continually (1 Thess. 5:17) that, as you daily spend time in the Word, the Holy Spirit would give you a deeper love for the God Who Is, He Who has gloriously revealed Himself to us in Christ clothed in the gospel!

For he who loves along with you anything that he does not love for your sake, loves you the less. O Love ever burning and never extinguished, Love, my God, set me ablaze! Augustine, Confessions, 10.29.40.

Wretched and restless indeed are those spirits which are carried away by this downward flux, revealing the depths of their darkness, stripped as it is of the raiment of your light; but through that very restlessness you give abundant proof of the greatness of your rational creation, which is unsatisfied and cannot know blessedness and rest in anything less than you, and hence not even in itself. For it is you, O Lord, who will lighten our darkness; from you arise our raiment, and our darkness shall be as the noonday. Give yourself to me, O God; restore yourself to me. Behold, I love you; if that is not enough, let me love you more strongly. I cannot measure and know how much love I lack; how much more would be enough to make my life run to your embraces and not turn aside until it was hidden in the hidden depth of your countenance. This alone I know: that without you it is not well with me, not only outwardly but also within myself, and that all my wealth that is not my God, is poverty. Augustine, Confessions, 13.8.9.