The Day Before Tomorrow

“For when David had served God’s purpose in his own generation, he fell asleep; he was buried with his fathers and his body decayed” (Acts 13:36).

Tick. Tick. Tick.

I can feel them slipping away. The moments. The only ones I have. Going. Steadily. Relentlessly. Irretrievably.

I remember the day God saved my keister. I met with an old-fashioned preacher man who had an Amish beard and a voice so deep he could summon whales. In his office I bowed my head and prayed simply: “Make it stick.” The preacher man then spoke over me like an Old Testament oracle, quoting a scripture passage I had not yet learned: “Satan has desired to sift you like wheat.” That was it. I said thanks and went home, wondering what was in store for me. It was January 1979.

Since then I’ve done a lot of stuff. Some good. Some not. I’ve taught high school and college. I did the pastor thing for awhile (quite crappily, I have to admit) and then launched a small non-profit organization. In the last six years I’ve made nearly thirty overseas trips to places like Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, India, Russia, Canada, and Bangladesh. I’ve tried a few radical things in my own backyard with mixed results.

Sometimes I stare out the window and try to add up my life. I’ve got a beautiful wife and four kids who love me a lot. I’ve got friends who seem not to mind proximity. I live in a house that shames me by its niceness. I’m not broke mostly.

Yet I often catch myself straining against the rope, a rope that is getting shorter each day. My greatest fear is going out with a whimper.

One cold afternoon in Petropavlovsk, on the Kamchatka peninsula of eastern Russia, I started a poem that begins like this:

I don’t want to die
With dreams to spare
But one alone, and flare
To ash

a whisp of smoke the air
dissolves

After four years I’ve never finished it. Maybe that’s all I have to say. I want to devour everything, then detonate like a suicide bomber and send a shock wave that rattles the earth. Sometimes I get screwed up, comparing my cards against the hands of the high and mighty. But I know there’s only one real game in town and the path to glory reads Via Dolorosa.

Damn the lures and the deals and the poster people. Damn my adulterous lust for the praise of men. Damn my consuming hunger for significance. Damn it all.

I am tumbling toward negation, falling to “the still point of the turning world” where I hope to find, must find redemption for what cannot be redeemed. All I have is what’s left. All I have is the day before tomorrow.