My Greatest Frustration

At the end of my life
I've a sense that I'll find out
how messed up my priorities have been.

How all the things I thought were important

being liked, financially secure,
respected in the community,
always trying to say and do the right thing,
and beating myself up when I didn't

in the end will amount to very little.

Not that all these things aren't important.
They are.

But I have walked with you
Father
lingering with you
basking in your presence
and it unearthed what has formed me
and us.
It was there I began to find clarity.

I have walked by the lakeside
sat down on a bench
looked across the waves and wind
and marveled at how delicate
and yet how resilient
is this creation,
and heard you speak deep truths
how we are too.
It was there I began to find direction.

I've spent too much time trying to be interesting
and not enough time being interested.

Too much time trying to know,
when all the comfort and direction came
out of the mystery.

I'm in a constant battle against myself.

Wanting to be connected
while looking for comfort in isolation
and then working too much out of what I have
which is quite thin.

I have been afraid while you have not.
I have been weak while you give life to all things.

Why do I worry, when the birds of the air are fed
and the lilies of the field are clothed so beautfully?

I loathe the idea of being a failure
and yet you would rather see me fail
than succeed at the things I thought were important
but were really just illusions, phantoms....
holographic projections with as much substance
as the sum total of a twinkie.

I'd rather conspire with you
to overthrow the ways of this world
the ways of my heart
where disease and hunger,
despair and loneliness,
busy-ness and escape,
reign in too many fiefdoms of the kingdom.

I want to live with a sense of peace in this world...
a world where people are consumed with working,
or relaxing, or carving out time in a schedule
or putting if off tomorrow, or making the deal.

a world too busy
to adjust to the weight of lingering in the garden,
and the depth of dwelling by the lakeside,

you are meant to be grasped over a lifetime
and yet you must be grasped quickly
as our mortality
or the mortality of someone we love,
looms not theoretically in the distance,
but before the dawn of the next day.

There just wasn't time enough to thing about such things.
And yet all the things there was time enough for
didn't sort out where we came from,
why we're here,
what to do about it,
and where it might lead us.

What I've wanted I've found.
I found it wanting
and yet I keep looking for all the same crap.

If I continue on this trajectory,
I will end my life looking,
when really I just want to be found.

That is my greatest frustration.