Growing Up – Pen and Fire

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When another year peels away,
like a husk of corn,
I break and bleed:
shedding youth is shedding dreams
some die quietly, but others go out with
a knife fight.
I revel and rejoice:
age wrinkles the heart first,
in a slow suicide of naivete,
pressing in the sorrow and sweetness,
like a double-edged sword
carving into me more longing and life
forming in me the image of Christ.

I have never felt the invincibility
of the young
but fragility is a familiar friend:
a sailboat spinning in the storm,
a bruised reed beaten by the winds,
an unspoken fear of dead ends.
Sometimes, the hammer has to fall
on my castles in the sand
these flimsy fortresses
that I might know, in every season,
the only Rock that stands.

Mark my days with delight and desire
for the one true God
If all else fades
fails
forsakes
and the darkness does not lift
make my smoldering wick
a brilliant flame
that testifies to His goodness
and the glory of His Name.

Photo by Mehmet Kürşat Değer on Unsplash

“But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” – C.S. Lewis

I’m not sure how one defines growing up, but from an unschooled eye, I see it in the small, insignificant things—trading in sneakers for the next size, dismissing mom as the personal chauffeur to sports games and parties—and I always see it in retrospect. The quiet evolution in interests, tastes, personality. The sometimes subtle, sometimes sudden, shedding of youthful naiveté. Childhood shifts into adulthood in a slow whirlwind of changing landscapes, foreign city lights blurred by rainfall, abandoned bookshelves and silent studios. A world marked simultaneously by noise and loneliness.

We leave behind the children’s stories and fairy tales. There are broken hearts strewn across our streets and suburbs, stomped over by a world in a rush to the subway and office, never pausing for a second glance. Sometimes, those are our hearts. Sometimes, we are the ones trampling them underfoot. Finally, we see—victims and oppressors all—happily-ever-after are for the idiots. We read survival guides for life and watch shows about messy people with frayed relationships and aimless days because it’s like looking in a mirror and laughing. Life doesn’t make cynics out of all of us, but we are hard-pressed to find the same lively spark of wonder and hope in the eyes of the aging.

Perhaps there is another shift from adulthood into old age, when we return to the past tales. When we grow weary of the world and the next new thing, and find there is really nothing new under the sun. That psychology, technology, governments, wars, treaties, prisons, corporations and social movements will never fix our brokenness. When we come to the end of ourselves and stand on the brink of our last heartbeats, perhaps the light will break into the crevasses and we will find that ancient wisdom speaks with new authority.

Perhaps we will pick up the old fairy tales, and we will see them like never before—not with scoffing condescension or childlike wonder. The scales will fall off our eyes and we will see the truth in the myth, the real in the surreal, and discover a magic that all the world cannot suppress—

—sunlight piercing the morning dew—

—fierce, untamable love —

—glory beyond the frailness of words—

Are these not the truest tales of all?

Tag: Growing Up

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