You’re not damaged. You’re not a pawn.
The stories you make yourself available too, the stories you tell, and the stories you believe are powerful. Because as it turns out, stories are what change the world. Stories are what change people. Stories are what has changed your life, too. And the thing with details is that the story you tell yourself about them makes all the difference.
Paul wrote to his friends in Ephesus and said:
"We have become Gods poetry, a re-created people that will fulfill the destiny God has given each of us..." *
Of all the things that you have been taught about what and who The Divine has created you to be; of all the things that religious leaders and faith communities, and traditions and instructions and authority figures say about who and how God wants you to be in the world, have you ever been told that you are Divine Poetry written like a song across the fabric of the universe?
A lot of modern translations say that Paul said "we are God's workmanship." But when translated from the original text, and within context, many scholars and theologians agree that the words 'poem and poetry' more closely communicate what Paul was saying.
You are poetry.
You are not a pawn,
Or an example.
Or a soldier.
Or a warrior.
Or an upholder of Truth.
Or moral police.
Or an authority on validity.
You are not damaged.
You are not broken.
You are not a servant.
You are not a Kingdom Builder.
When Paul wrote this letter, the movers and shakers of his society and the world at large at the time, were poets (I would argue that they still are). Virgil wrote 'Aenead' while Jesus was learning to walk. As did Ovid. He completed "Metamorphoses" around 8 A.D. The great poets' Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Euripides and more were the countries heroes and forefathers. By the time the early Church was half-organised, the singing of hymn-like songs had been a cultural tradition for Greeks and Romans for more than eight hundred years; poetic verse sung in gathered community (Christians did not invent worship services, soz, and they don't own the market on music being a gateway to the spiritual).
Poetry was how people remembered the important things: story, values, politics, history. The ancients across many cultures set their legacies to rhyme and verse so it could be memorised and passed down through the generations. Genesis begins with one such poem, the poem of creation told in beautiful imagery and language, not as a history lesson, but so that we would be able to capture the essence of something, someone, a miraculousness, that set this whole thing in motion.
In his book, "On Writing," Stephen King said:
"The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out."
That is why we have poetry. Poetry communicates the unsayable. Humanity, human life, your life, your neighbours and your families, and the people over there, and the people you hate, and the people who hate you... are the rhyme and verse and rhythm of the story that God is telling - they speak the unspeakable into being.
"Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry." – Jack Kerouac
"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep." – Salman Rushdie.
"Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry." – Mary Oliver.
"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history." – Plato
You are God's poetry. You are the language of the Divine manifest in bodily form, rising out of the dust to tell the story of love. God writes God's story into the world, each of us a word, a phrase, a portrait, a brushstroke, a line in a living drama, weaving together the mystery of it all into something beautiful, glorious, redeemed.
Before you let anyone tell you what God wants from you, what God wants you to be and do and achieve, know that first and foremost, YOU are the story, your life is a verse in a tale that is being told across time and history and experience of who love is, how love is, and how it is apart of you and everyone and everything.
Mindful Prompt: You're not telling a story, you are the story, you're living it, in real-time. What you need is here (Wendell Berry). It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world. (Mary Oliver). Show up, in love, and be.
Continued in the upcoming series called "Beauty Is In The Details", this week with a subscription in the App.
Written by Liz Milani.
Instagram: @thepracticeco
* Eph 2:10
