Like a tether

i'm like a tether

knocked about

bouncing off

the flat of Your hands

kneed in the side

i limp along

bent and aching

like Jacob, panting

his sciatic acting up 

'pon wrestling You

i don't understand myself

hanging out with You

as if sadism's Your trait

and punishments all i want

who'd think a Daddy would

stand by, doin' nothin'

watch His son nailed

mocked upon a cross?

You're weird, you know

quiet as they come

yet  Your silence holds me

where'er i turn to run;

fleeing from Your presence

You always seem to be

breathing down my back

even when i'm alone

ever since i've know You

felt You as a strange pain

i've been riveted to Your presence

a weird-wonder to refrain

why are You so difficult?

how distant can You be?

yet i love You none the less

Your tether and Your call

*For a human being to say that the cosmos is all there is strikes me as like a worm  in an apple saying that the apple is all there is.  Even if we could solve all the problems of the cosmos and stood here healthy, solvent, adjusted, and proud in our knowledge at last, we would still stand here like Moses with the muck of our less-than-humanness on our shoes and the feeling in the pits of our stomachs that the cosmos can never entirely be home because we know as surely as we know anything that  though we have never seen it except in dreams, our true home lies somewhere else.  Those dreams are the ultimate madness the church is built upon, or, because those who call them madness are themselves the madder still, the ultimate sanity.

-Frederick Buechner