My reading of Psalm 23:

God is my shepherd.
The pulse in the throat when I forget how to breathe.
The fierce, quiet thing that stops me from starving.

God is the voice that finds me counting stale crumbs
in the kitchen of my worth,
and says, “No. We will not do scarcity today.”

God knows the wild animal that’s trapped inside my chest,
the mouth beneath the mouth that begs to be filled,
the heavy iron ache that eats but is never fed.

And still, She doesn’t ration out Her tenderness.
She doesn’t serve Her mercy with a medicine spoon.
She tilts the whole sky.

Love makes me lie down in the overgrown, unmowed patches of my own life.
The places that are green at the wound and feral at the root,
where joy is barefoot and screaming.

The Light unbuttons the desert from my gums
and leads me to to a lake lying open beneath the moon.
The water doesn’t require documented proof of dehydration
or evidence of the drought I endured.
It sees my thirst and cracked lips
and completely forgets its banks.

Later, God enters the dive-bar bathroom
without covering Her nose.
She finds my soul curled around the base of the sink:

face bloodied,
halo bent like a bottle cap,
both hands locked around the invoice for its own erasure.

God tears it once. Then again.
Then keeps tearing until it becomes confetti.

The Holy leads me by the back roads,
past the billboards that are promising a more profitable grief,
past the toll booths accepting integrity as exact change,
past the priests who demand that I surrender softness
because they forgot how scary it is to stay human.

“Come,” God says.
“There are places we can only reach by refusing to become the price of admission.”

God is not in a hurry.
God knows the way home cannot be traveled at the speed of escape.

And even when the road narrows where the light goes flat and gray.
Even when the plastic chairs in the ICU are bolted to the floor,
and the doctor’s mouth is moving, but every word comes out underwater.
Even when Death takes off its coat, pulls up a chair, and calls the people I love by name,
I will not call myself abandoned.
I will not drink fear even when it’s the only cup being passed.

For You are with me.
Not above me or behind me, but with me —
ankle-deep in everything I begged You to keep away.

Your rod is the spine You give me to stand back up.
Your staff is the calloused grip of a friend
who sits with me in the dark and doesn’t ask to turn on the lights.

You drag a wobbly card table into the middle of the crossfire.
The snipers adjust their scopes,
while You shake out a white cloth and set out a feast of bruised peaches and warm bread.
You look at the firing squad of the anxiety that eats me alive,
the history that continues to haunt,
the voices that insist I am alone,
and You say, “Pull up a chair. Let them watch you eat.”

You pour summer rain over the winter in me.
You anoint me with both hands shaking,
like a mother blessing the child she almost lost.
The water finds every scar and turns it towards the light,
like sunflowers with terrible memories.

My cup overflows.
Not because nothing was taken,
but because after everything was taken,
something kept arriving:

a hand finding mine in the blackout
without pretending it knows where the fusebox hides,
a smile from a stranger who knows we’re all doing the best we can,
a friend saying, You’re doing great,
with the brutal tenderness of someone who knew I wasn’t,

and for one whole minute,
sorrow couldn’t remember if it was coming or going.

Surely goodness and mercy will find me all the days of my life.
They will find me when I am faithful
and when I am face-down on the kitchen floor.
They will find me when I sing and when I cannot lift my grief.
They will come to the locked house where I have hidden from being loved,
kick the door from its hinges, and call into the dust: We know you are in there.
They will drag me from every grave I furnished as a home.

And when my body finally returns its library books:

the blue ocean in my eyes,
the red metronome of my heart,
the twin lung-brothers reading the air aloud,

I will wake in the chest of God, the only house I’ve ever known,
and I will know that this whole time:

The valley was a room.
The table was a room.
The wound was a window cut by stone.
And Love was the wind that blew through the house,
promising in every gust to never turn the deadbolt again.

“Psalm 23”
16×20 Acrylic and Oil on Canvas