... and I didn't know it

Last Friday I sat down in our hotel room and started writing on a poem while my partner napped. It’s my first poem, if you don’t count the haiku I have been writing for the last couple years or so. The whole poetry thing has been growing in me for quite some time. It has seemed strange to me that poetry would start calling to me as it is something I have always struggled to get. In my college literature class I breezed through fiction and drama but I really had to work at poetry and I still didn’t think I got it.

But it’s been calling to me, to which my bookshelves can testify. Mostly, I’ve dabbled in reading it or about it but I hadn’t attempted to write anything.

Until Friday. So I wrote without much attention to where it was going. I wrote until what was in me to write seemed written and I stopped and moved on to other things.

Saturday we spent the day with the German student we had hosted a couple years back. We went to the Cleveland Museum of Art (consider this a recommendation). Later we drove him and another on his delegation to the airport. Sunday morning we headed home.

Sunday evening, after I had unpacked and started some laundry I looked at the poem again.

O.M.G. The poem had a theme that I hadn’t intended and hadn’t seen before. I didn’t so much write the poem as it wrote itself to me. The experience has been deeply spiritual. I know on some level that poetry is/should be spiritual but it really wasn’t my intent when I started writing.

Like Jacob, God was in this place and I didn’t know it. I’m left with this even stronger sense that the Presence is always with us… if we can find a way to step aside and let it show itself to us. I don’t feel I’m especially good at recognizing God in the moment so I feel very much like Jacob when I look back on my day—or a poem I have written—and surprised to see that God was there and I didn’t know it.