Ya Just Never Know Where

Sometimes its easy.  Sometimes not so much.
There are times when it is as easy as opening your senses to your surroundings.
Other times its like trying to find a needle in a haystack.  (How and why did that needle get in the haystack, is what I wanna know.)

I am in the business of pointing others toward the finding, toward the discovery...but much of the time I am clueless myself, and couldn't make the finding or the discovery no matter how hard I tried.

Truth is, ya just never know where.

Elusive.  That's the word, elusive.

Wouldn't it be great if it were this easy?  Maybe.

There are folks who claim it is this easy.  They can and will point you to Jesus at the drop of a hat...sometimes you don't even have to drop your hat, they will grab you by the throat and take you to where their Jesus is.  Scary.

You and I would do well to stay clear of folks like that.  You and I would do well to not be like those folks.

Here is a poem, written by Peter Putnam...it sums up well my sense of how hard and how easy it is to discover God-in-the-flesh, to find Jesus.

This poem was given to Grace Lee Boggs in 2010, on her 95^th birthday. Boggs was the force behind Detroit Summer, a multicultural intergenerational youth program, in 1992. As recently as 2005, she continued to write a column for the Michigan Citizen newspaper.

 

 Detroit Jesus

Time, Inc., buys a house in Detroit
and tries to track him for a year.
But he’s invisible to those looking for a
blue-eyed dude in a white robe
or for a city gone completely to hell.

He is the cinnamon of my son’s skin
with a green thumb and a Tigers cap
and my daughter’s dove-grey eyes.
He prays into Blair’s guitar,
hangs out on Field St.,
bakes bread at Avalon
and plants tomatoes on the East side.
He rides his old-school bike down the heart
of Grand River,
paints a mural in the Corridor,
shoots hoop in the Valley
with priests and pimps and lean young men
trying to jump their way to heaven.

 At night,
while the Border Patrol counts cars,
he walks across the water
to Windsor,
grabs a bite to eat,
walks back.

Like Grace,
born in Providence,
he lives so simply,
he could live anywhere:
Dublin, Palestine, Malibu.
But Detroit is his home.
It was here one Sunday
a boy invited him down
off the cross
and into his house
for a glass of Faygo red pop.

That was centuries ago, it seems,
and how far he’s come,
reinventing himself more times than Malcolm.
He’s been to prison,
been to college,
has a tattoo of Mary Magdalene on one arm,
Judas on the other,
and knows every Stevie Wonder song by heart.

He’s Jimmy, he’s Invincible, he’s Eminem.
He’s the girls at Catherine Ferguson
and their babies,
and he’s the deepest part of Kwame
still innocent as a baby.

The incinerator is hell,
but he walks right in,
burns it up with love,
comes out the other side,
walks on.

 He can say Amen in twelve religions,
believes school is any place
where head and heart and hands
meet,
and wears a gold timepiece around his neck
with no numbers, just a question:
What time is it on the clock of the world?

 And every second of every day
he answers that question
with a smile wide as the Ambassador
and a heart as big as Belle Isle,
hugging this city in his arms
and whispering to each soul
words no one else dares to say:
You are Jesus,
this is your Beloved Community,
and the time
on the clock of the world
is Now.