Like Ripples . . .

It seems part of my nature to beat myself up when I think I have failed, and often when I don’t. I suspect most people are not satisfied with themselves, and whether that dissatisfaction expresses itself in bragging (to compensate) or bemoaning (fishing for affirmation), everyone needs assurance of their value.
 

When Jesus Christ came into my life, He gave me a new nature. The old is still there, dead to God but alive to sin. I’m supposed to consider it dead and put it off, not allowing it to rule my thoughts, words or actions. Instead, I’m to put on the new life God has given me. This new life has no problem with self-esteem for God created it. Self-pity and boasting are activities of the old nature and no longer needed. Instead, I am to pay attention to what God says about me and base my worth on His Word.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)

As a Christian, I am a product of the working of God. In this amazing verse, the Greek word for “workmanship” is poēima, from where we get our word “poem.” I looked up “poem” on an online dictionary and found this quote from John Ciardi.

For a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can say where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water? ... The ripples continue to move and the light to change on the water and the longer one watches the more changes he sees. And such shifting-and-being-at-the-same-instant is of the very sparkle and life of poetry. Of poetry and of life itself. For the poem is a dynamic and living thing. One experiences it as one experiences life…. One is never done with it: every time he looks he sees something new, and it changes even as he watches. And that very sense of continuity in fluidity is one of the kinds of knowledge, one of the ways of knowing, that only the arts can teach, poetry foremost among them.

The imagery in this quote makes me shiver. Is that what God means when He says I am His poem? That I can shift and change and sparkle with life that is always new and always offering to others a fascinating continuity? 

My ‘beat myself up’ self almost laughs at this possibility. Yet I know that Jesus Christ is like that. He is the ultimate work of art, the very Word of God made flesh. In Him are the glories of the Living God. He is the Word, the One who acted when God spoke the world into existence. 

And I am His workmanship. He says so. My challenge is to believe Him and stop listening to that self-centered and self-depreciating old nature that is dead but refuses to lie down and shut up.

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Lord, this image of being a poem, being like ripples on water, ever changing and always filled with the sparkle of new life, Your life, fills me with awe. Yet I know that if I am to live as Your workmanship, I cannot watch myself no more than a ripple can watch itself. Instead, I must keep my eyes and focus on You and walk by faith for You are the ultimate Word, the poetry of God that is my dynamic, my very life.

His Poetry

What is a poem? Oxford says it is “a literary composition that is given intensity by particular attention to diction (sometimes involving rhyme), rhythm, and imagery.”

Poetry condenses thoughts, distills an idea or impression into the least amount of words carefully arranged to provoke response. The poet chooses just the right words, repeats the sound of them or the idea of them, moving in a cadence that makes sense with the subject matter and style of each poem, and creates an image in the mind of those who hear, an image one determined by the poet, yet also subjective in relation to the hearer’s frame of mind, experience, and reference points.

With that in mind, Ephesians 2:10 jumps to life. It has to be a poet’s and a writer’s most favorite verse. It says, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”

Why the appeal to poets? The word ‘workmanship’ is ‘poema’ which is the source of our word ‘poem.’ Those who are “saved by grace through faith” (verses 8 and 9) are poems created by the Master of words, God Himself!

Words. Communication sometimes happens without them, but even then, whatever is conveyed is interpreted by words. When the words are composed with particular attention they make an impression, good or bad, soft or harsh, dull or explosive. Words have power to create or destroy, heal or harm, build or tear down. God ‘spoke’ the world into existence. His words are powerful, creative, awesome.

His Word also became flesh. Jesus Christ appeared as man, the Living Word. He is “the brightness of His (God’s) glory and the express image of His person” (Hebrews 1:3). If anyone was ever a perfect poem, a perfect expression of God Himself, it is Jesus.

And Ephesians 2:10 says Jesus is a poet as well, making poems of His people. He takes the right words (the biblical word is rhema meaning “just the right word for the need of the moment”) and speaks them into our hearts. We do not live by bread alone, but by these rhema words that come from the mouth of God.

Not only that, He repeats them in a cadence (some of us need more repetition than others) so we become easy on the ears, have a rhythm that is pleasing. Our lives speak, sometimes with words, the sweet movement of the Holy Spirit.

As He works and reworks us through His Word, He produces imagery, actually one image, teaching us to keep our eyes and our ears on Him, the Master Craftsman. Then, “we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”

Most of the time I feel more like a jumble of words, a lot of noise, or even at times a silence in a dark cave, not a poem. Yet this verse in Ephesians carries the idea that His creative work, His ‘editing’ is ongoing, a work still in progress.

As a writer, I know that my first draft is rough and hard on the ears. As I revise and rework, it hopefully improves. With God as my editor, I trust Him to do the same with me, using the best form for the poem He has in mind. Whether He chooses a sonnet or haiku, quatrain or limerick is not as important and the resulting expression, an image or reflection of Himself in my life.

This little word ‘poema’ is my rhema from the Lord today.