if ever you wish to fly, run

with all the strength within you

run like a gazelle, leaping

leaping o'er the obstacles you're holding

bearing them to the box of your containment

release your self from the trap of containment

from the leech encircling your heart

allow your tears to flow, be freed

from the barnacles of ancient ghosts

who laugh at your wasted tears

washing away the pain of struggles for freedom

you are more than a baboon dancing on a limb

green with frustrations for you to eat

you are a human, a broken finger on the Hand of God

holding you up under the pressure of glory

glory, glory, if you decide not to plop

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -...to be a child is to be all of one piece, to respond to life, to love, as totally and unthinkingly as even we, who are no longer children, can still respond to the sound of our own name if someone shouts it out suddenly.

  -After we have given  so much of our lives to the task of trying to understand, after we have been so continually anxious lest our faith wither and bear no fruit, then it is a real shock to be told that it is only by not trying to be that we become, that it is only by not resisting evil that we defeat it, that it is only by losing our lives that we save them.

  -It is just when we realize that it is impossible by any effort of our own to make ourselves children and thus to enter the kingdom of Heaven that we become children.  We are children perhaps, at the very moment we we know that it is as children that God loves us - not because we have deserved his love and not because recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he  loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our Lord.