a poem, a lesson and a promise...

You probably can't read the above. But it's a poem by William Wordsworth. It was a poem that I was forced to dissect with a pencil day after day, note every possible intention in the authors mind, and read it until my eyes dried up with boredom, even learn it by heart when the time came. As you can immagine, my enthusiasm for Wordsworth was pretty low. I was told to love it and appreciate it- I was an english student, I was meant to!- and as such my Human Condition, the part that rebells against authority, didn't let me.
But now I do love it. I love it enough to blog about it! So what changed?
Well, when I read back on it, and immagined the scene Wordsworth tried to capture with his careful selection of metaphors, adverbs and exclamation... I felt what he was was trying to do. I now read it and see the morning light hit the domes and spheres and feel the human heart in the city. I love the poem. Because I read it because I wanted to, and loved it from my own freedom to. From my own free will.
And so it got me thinking....
...and as I do most of the time, when I ponder, my thoughts turned it back to God.
Because isn't  all that a little like what God wants from us?
Maybe God put us in that fateful garden with that deadly tree, confronted us with that poisonous fruit and inevitable choice.... because he wanted us to be free to chose him or not. If we're told we have to love God, we must worship him, we must give up our own way and choose his... it'll be with a heart that resents and struggles and beats only to escape. But when we chose God with that freedom, when we look at Him and swear his way is the right way, and know his truth is the only truth, and he is the life we must live... that's when God is happiest with us. His creation. Because that's what we were made to do.
So that was one little lesson I learnt from looking back over an old poem, that an old man wrote many many years ago.
But this isn't just a lesson that we learn, commit to God, and then move on from. No, we are confronted with such poisonous fruit every single day. There won't be a time when we don't have to decide, even subconciously, which way we're doing to take. Are we going to use our given freedom to choose God? The fact that we can come back from the wrong decision, to live and decide again, is a grace granted through the cross. And it's a lesson that christians are never too old to be reminded of- despite what they may think- it's a promise we can come back to daily, and thank God for. It's a promise to take and write poems about, because the "earth has not anything to show more fair" than Jesus Christ, and the cross he died on.