My reading of Psalm 103:

Listen to me, my soul. Unclench the jaw of the spirit.
Tell every bruised and frantic, doom-scrolling cell in this meat-suit
to bless the name of the wild, untamed Breath that composts our grief into topsoil.

The one who spun the galaxies out of spit and stardust.
Do not forget the favors.
Do not let the amnesia of Wednesday erase the miracles of Tuesday.

This is the Love that looks at the spectacular, beautiful, ugly of my life
and doesn't ask for a credit score.
She leans in and whispers: “Come home.”

This is the One who kneels in the sterile waiting rooms of my chronic pain 
and presses thumbs into the inflamed joints until they remember how to bloom.
The One who lowered Himself into the concrete mouth of the pit —
that gaping hole they built for the outcasts, the boring, the addicts, the trans kids,
and every poor bastard whose honest questions ruined the sermon.
This is the Lift that pulled me out by the roots, with soil still clinging to everything I had mistaken for shame.

The Name who doesn’t just forgive the debt, but burns the ledger in the street.
Who crowns me not with gold, but with the heavy, fierce responsibility of being alive.
Who feeds me until every fear-feather loosens from the living root
and remembers how to eagle-up and ride the winds of a world
that is, despite everything, still breathtaking.

The Divine is in the business of dismantling empires. Of unionizing the oppressed.
This is the God who showed up in the desert dust not with a rulebook,
but with a pickaxe and a blueprint for a world where the last are first.

And then there is the mercy — the load-bearing wall of all that is and ever will be.

The Maker is slow to anger,
which is a miracle considering that my ego could witness a burning bush
and suggest a little cadmium orange to make the flames feel more pointed.

But slowness is not absence. It is intention gathering heat.
It is love holding the reins so that when the rage does rise,
it never arrives as shrapnel; it never falls at random.
It knows its way through the dark. It walks straight to the door:
to the solitary cell where time is starved of windows,
to the rivers choked on the grease of our progress,
to the pipeline trench that chews through sacred ground,
to the border where a mother is made to prove her child is worthy of water.

God does not itemize my ruin.
They do not photocopy my failures and distribute them to the angels,
nor hand my soul over to the brutal mathematics of empire
where every person is either profitable, punishable, or in the way.
God does not repay me according to the wreckage I’ve caused.
God repays me according to God.

Because for as high as the canopy is above the forest floor,
that is how high this radical grace towers over my shame.

For as impossibly far as the east is from the west —
a distance that doesn't even exist on a sphere, just an endless, vanishing horizon—
that is how far God has thrown my trespasses into the compost to feed the upcoming harvest.

The Creator looks at us the way a mother looks at a kid who just spilled the milk,
who just broke the vase, who was just trying to figure out gravity.
Tenderly: not soft nor blind, but fierce enough to hold the consequence without dropping the child.
She picks out the glass in our feet.

Because the Holy remembers our construction:
calcium scaffolding, borrowed carbon, a little hurricane behind the eyes.
God knows that we are dust wearing shoes and running errands,
a handful of earth given twenty thousand mornings and no clear instructions except:
Love one another fiercely before the oceans rise and the wild grass withers away.

We bloom like dandelions cracking the pavement of the oppressors,
every bright head a tiny and vulgar refusal to stay buried.
We flash green and desperate in the morning sun,
and accept that by afternoon, time will have its boots on our neck.
The wind blows, the algorithm forgets us, and even the earth won’t recall which pile of dust was ours.

But the Love of the Lord?

That is from the first hydrogen atom stuttering itself into light
to the final black hole closing its cold mouth.
It moves through the mycelial network beneath the frost,
passing sugar from the strong trees to the sick ones.
It stretches from the before-time to the after-time,
wrapping around the ones who revere the sacred,
the ones who split the loaf,
unbolt the spare room,
learn the poor’s actual name,
the ones who stretch their generosity wider than their fear.

So bless the Holy, you angels.
You disruptors. You ancestors. You mutineers of the Divine.
You who listen for the whisper of the sacred and move like a revolution.
Bless the Holy, all you armies of the gentle,
all you servants who do what pleases the Architect by washing each other's feet.
Bless the Holy, all creation, in every inch of this bruised, beautiful, spinning dominion.

And as for me? Bless the Holder, O my soul. Wake up the marrow within.
Tell every bruised, frantic, beating thing inside this chest
to praise the name of the Love that meets us
in the dust, in the protest, in the quiet,
and pulls us into the stars.

“Psalm 103” Acrylic and Oil on Canvas
24×24

The above poem will be signed and included with the purchase of this painting.