In the cramped and confined chamber of covenant
lies the wide-eyed seed,
the dividing cell,
lie lights high in the night sky
and the water well
as winter hum-drum becomes hundreds
of roadside poppies clumped in cluster after cluster
sloppily spilling their orange laughter
on every passer-by,
and I feel their joy, contagious beneath
oyster-pearl clouds tumbling
out of heaven’s store,
more and more,
more and more,
the unseen droplets
from an unseen ocean
carried along on an unseen wind
filling the blue above us again,
piling up enough to tell the story of your love.
And is it any wonder the first “let there be”
has led you to this whispered “I do”
on which hangs the mustard seed truth
buried in the ancient test:
cast your net on the other side
to see what happens next.
My beautiful daughter Randi Lynn married Jake Sanders last Sunday under a sunny sky in Woodburn, Oregon. The day, the ceremony, the company, and the joy were all effervescent, and we are rejoicing in God’s goodness and lavish grace. Having written a poem on the occasion of both of my sons’ weddings, I completed the wedding trilogy with this reflection for Randi and Jake on that nature of covenant-making. While on the surface making a life-long covenant with one person might seem like a limiting and compressing action, it in fact is the counter-intuitive key to an explosive and expansive love being released into the world, much like gun power in a pile on a table when lit with a match will make much flash and smoke but little punch, but compressed into the tight space of a chamber can send the heavy cannonball hurtling. Jesus, the quintessential expression of God’s covenant love, squeezed as He was into a fully human body, consistently called forth the lavish out of the vacuum: whether feeding the huge multitude with one boy’s lunch, or making 180 gallons of amazing wine out of water sitting in the purification jars in the late hours of a local wedding, or telling His disciples to cast their night-long empty net on the other side of the boat…