Where is the Story?

Where is the robust Story, strong enough  

to bear the weight of bodies and of souls, 

to touch millennia of wounds and scars 

softly, with healing, 

to feel a billion billion muscles strain towards life? 

Where are the benedictions that we crave  

when blessings seem in short supply? 

Will we, like Jacob, smelling like the hunters we are not 

and wearing the skins of deception,  

steal from an unseeing one  

the blessing for which we thirst? 

Or will we live our un-narrated lives, 

and say as Esau says, “I have enough”, 

set out for the margin, known from that moment on   

not as ourselves but as our children? 

Where is the story that will catch us 

as we plummet from the brink,  

pushed off the page  by our own bare adequacy, 

by our having enough and no more? 

Will we wrestle  with a Stranger in our dream, 

seize our blessing and receive our limp? 

Will we fall and rise again like Joseph, 

trafficked by his brothers –  

slave, 

prisoner, 

then unlikely hero (who mines the truth of dreams)  

then slaves again,  

who flee the Pharoah-Story that was home, 

then set out across a desert towards  

a freedom more confounding than their bonds, 

a people waiting for more Story, 

and for One who writes redemption? 

We wait, too. 

 Where is the robust Story, 

strong enough to bear the weight of Hagar, Esau, 

jealous brothers, favouring mothers, 

fathers who know the binding on Moriah as their own, 

fathers who bless blindly  

and bless better than they know? 

Where is the One 

Who writes a Story of redemption  

with a wounded and relentless hand –  

writes a glad river and a tree of life,  

leaves for the healing of the nations, 

and of us – 

and of us all?