I told a friend yesterday that I invited God to join me, but I’m not sure what his schedule is. I suspect he’s pretty busy, and that’s okay. God doesn’t have to show up. But if he does, I am taking a deck of cards and an extra glass to pour him a Coke if that suits him.

This Sunday during my poetry notes on the lesson, I found a poem about every good thing.  It is a little more church centered than I usually write. Typically, I try to find God outside the church. Not because God isn’t in the church, but because we that is where we expect to find him. God is there, but he is not imprisoned there.

Every Good Thing

Before the prayer begins, the candles are lit.
Before the candles are lit, the acolytes dressed
in white and before that the children’s minister
waits for them in the narthex where the robes
hang after the robes have been ironed after
they have come out of the dryer after
they went into the wash after the soap
poured from the card board box into water
after someone shopped for soap walking
the linoleum aisles of the grocery store
past dog food and sandwich baggies.
The check can be written at the checkout
because the hand has learned to write
in the schools from the teachers
who went to college and now stand
in the rooms built by construction workers
whose payment came from taxes
attached to income and property
and hotel occupancy. The check
for the soap needs more than a hand.
It is a good faith pledge, good because
the plate passed from hand to hand
between people who paid taxes, then
gave to church–a little for soap and other
things–after the Scripture reading
after the candles are lit after we pray.

Photograph “St. Nicholas Parish Church, Arundel, West Sussex” by Mike Cattell used under a Creative Commons license.

Those of us who believe in God have forgotten how to be with God. Forget working for God. Each day, take a moment to sit at God’s feet. Listen to God. Read the Bible. Tell him what is going on in your life, in your work, in your relationships. When we are faithful to God in this way, he gives us peace and contentment. This contentment is the reward of our faith, according to Robert Flynn’s latest article at TheHighCalling.org. It is also the subject of Bill Peel’s second article on taking your faith to work. This week, Bill talks about the importance of praying for our work.

God wants us to trust him with our work. And we can trust him. The God who calmed the seas for fishermen can change the culture of your workplace too.

Photograph used under a Creative Commons license.

You can still click over to Joe’s site with its great pictures. But my pictures will have to rely on your imagination.

Stand Up Straight

“Respect authority,” we say to our first
grade boys, but they know the signs
are sometimes wrong. It is not eight
miles to town but four. The measurement
of government does not match
our odometer, punched as we drove by
the boy who said, “The sign is wrong.”
Rules and measurements make sense
only when true. God only knows how
many people drive past Main Street
missing the civic life, owners waving
in their store fronts, advertising
specials and sales, and the church
signs shouting our doom in black
letters or holding up the love of Christ
like theological carrots, lures for jack
asses who think life is still miles,
at least four, away from all of this.

It was somewhat related to my work (I’m an editor) so I opened the email and found myself reading the first chapter of Across the Universe. And reading. And reading. I’m a pretty big fan of science fiction and young adult fiction, so this was right up my alley.

How did I know it was young adult? Because the first person protagonist, Amy, is just a kid, barely old enough to have breasts that she has showed to a boy “just that one time, the night I found out I would leave behind everything on Earth, and everything included him.” It’s a coming of age novel. Also, the ad said to email yrpenguin with our thoughts. (YR = “young reader.”) Also, most obviously, the book is published by Penguin Razorbill which seems to be turning over a new leaf from its normal fare like Kevin Bolger’s Sir Fartsalot Hunts a Booger.

Though, really, Bolger’s title has some guts in its own way.

And Across the Universe was good. The “best first chapter you’ll ever read” good? I’m not sure. Tim O’Brien’s opening to The Things They Carried is probably better. The beginning of Genesis is probably better. And the beginning of John about the Word. Super cool.

But this was a good first chapter. In fact, it’s good enough that I can forgive a marketing department’s enthusiastic hyperbole.

I clicked over to the book’s website and discovered the horrible truth. The book doesn’t come out until January 2011. 138 days, 13 hours, 20 minutes, and 23 seconds from the time I’m writing this post.

This got me thinking. How would others respond to this? I posted a link to the first chapter on Facebook. My aunt liked the link, which I assume to mean she read the chapter. My community theater friend read the chapter and said, “thanks for sharing Marcus – although the tears are still welling up! – think I may have to get on my kindle2!!” When I confessed that the book wouldn’t be out for five months, she groaned, “oh my – please remind me when it does – you can’t imagine how much I am caught-up in it!!!”

I love my community theater friend for many reasons, least of all that she’s in her seventies and unafraid to use that many exclamation points.

The chapter stayed with me all day, so that I sent the link to my parents at one point. Then another editor. Then I made my wife read it after dinner while I played legos with my son and listened to my daughter practice violin.

What makes the chapter so good? I invite you to read it and share your thoughts. I think it is the growing sense of horror. At first, you aren’t sure what is going on except that it requires a girl’s parents to take off their clothes in public. Then you realize the horrible details, and you don’t understand why anyone would do this. Then you realize the potential payout and worry that it is not worth the cost young Amy will pay. Finally, the chapter ends on a plot twist with more guts than  Sir Fartsalot on a Booger Hunt.

All of this works because the narrator is so unflinching and honest and trusting. The simple YR sentences work just like Harry Potter, speeding the plot along, building characterization fluidly and easily. It reminds me of books like Hatchet or The Giver. The cover looks like Twilight which I won’t comment any more about. I’m hoping this author can deliver material as complex and engaging as Margo Lanagan or Ursula K. LeGuin. That’s a tall order for a new author, but the email subject line did promise “THE BEST FIRST CHAPTER YOU’LL EVER READ.”

Finally, Penguin asked for our thoughts. So here are mine.

If Beth Revis can sustain this, the book is going to be super cool. I’m hoping she and her high school students will have a very good year.

“It’s humbling to work with you,” they said, “because all we do is sell soap and cars. Your goals are so much loftier.”

What?! I don’t mean to be rude, but I hate it when Christians talk like this. In fact, this kind of talk allows us to separate our faith from our daily life. As if faith goals are loftier. As if faith goals include things that happen on Sunday morning and dramatic experiences of self-sacrifice that can be used as somebody’s sermon example.

Our lives can’t be reduced to a series of simple, inspirational sermon examples. I’m not even sure God wants that for us. Life is messy. Work is messy. But we struggle through the mess, and our struggle honors God. We don’t just give up. We don’t just say, “Gee, I wish my work were loftier.” Or “Gee, I wish I had a higher calling.”

The high calling network isn’t a collection of higher calling bloggers. I’m tired of that kind of competitive, comparative language. For just a minute, I wish Christians and churches could stop being so competitive. We all serve the same God. We all have the same high calling–to live in such a way that our actions honor God. Any honorable work done well is done for the glory of God.

As for the friends who went out to lunch with David, I’m afraid they’ve endured my soap box several times since they talked with David. They’re my friends, too. In fact, I just emailed them this morning. They are good, good people.

I don’t know what David told them that day.  I imagine it was something like this:

“So you sell cars and soap. Great! The world needs advertising that glorifies God. Create ads that sell cars with  integrity. Create ads for soap that are beautiful. Excellent work has intrinsic value to God and to the world–even if you are just selling cars and soap.”

God likes good work. Our lives can be a living sacrifice to him. That doesn’t mean we add an icthus watermark to every memo and email and report. It means we trust God to accept what we do for him–without needing to receive recognition for it.

And, of course, we stand ready with answers about our faith when people ask.

Think for a minute about your own work day–whether you receive pay for your work or not. What do you do from 8:00 – 5:00? How is your work a way of loving your neighbor? What is the intrinsic value of your work?

Photograph “Bull riding” by Jami Dwyer, used under a Creative Commons license.

The party went great, by the way. Matt Priour’s work in the boiler room made everything function much more smoothly and efficiently. Posts appeared almost as soon as I clicked on the game button. And there were very few hiccups from my perspective. Of course, we’re learning as we go, but last night was a big step in game functionality.

This morning, I thought I should enter the One Shot Wednesday game, posting a poem here for the One Stop Poetry group. Instead of just posting one poem, I want to talk about editing poetry.

A few weeks ago, I wrote this little poem:

On Meeting with an Elderly Man for Coffee and Pie

The scrapbooks were all destroyed in a hurricane
that hit Corpus Christi, the body of Christ
on the Texas coast. Everything flooded, water and mud
rose above office desks until all information
drowned in the sludge. Every storm is an act
of God, no more surprising than the last act.
Who can understand clouds this deep?
Even when they unfold in slick sheets
and wind makes the water drop sideways.
We may not drown, but we always lose
bits of our recorded selves to the elements.
Until paper returns to pulp and text to ink.
The flood swallows whatever we think.

The wonderful thing about the internet is that we can publish poems as quickly as we can write them. The challenge is to keep working the craft, to increase our quality as well as our quantity.

As much as I enjoy publishing poems online as fast as I can write them, I want my work to have credibility and integrity. That means I need the editorial advice that poets receive when they work with journals. I confess I don’t have the time or patience to work with most journals in the MFA circuit. I do read a few, Poetry, 32 Poems, Books and Culture, Image, and Christian Century(which always includes poetry, thank God). I even work with some of those editors a bit as well.

But every poem needs an editorial eye. Iron sharpens iron, and the web is too often my own iron swishing through the air alone like some kind of Star Wars kid.

Enter Thomas Turner. Thomas reached out to me a few weeks ago after writing a review of my book, Barbies at Communion. He asked if I would review some of his poems, and I happily agreed to do so.

He sent me two poems. I edited them in Microsoft Word, tracking the changes and leaving comments, then returned the poems to him, with two of my own, including the one above.

“Now it’s your turn,” I said.

Thomas was a good sport. He edited my two poems and sent them back with the changes tracked. Here’s what it looked like:

Ultimately, Thomas recommended cutting the final rhyming couplet, which felt forced to him. Rather than cut the lines, I took his hesitation about them to be a call to revisit them a bit. Here’s another version of the poem based on my work with Thomas.

On Meeting with an Elderly Man for Coffee and Pie

His scrapbooks were destroyed in a hurricane
that hit body of Christ on the Texas coast.
Water and mud rose above office desks
until memory drowned in the sludge.
We do not drown when clouds unfold
in slick sheets and wind makes the water
drop sideways, but we always lose
our recorded selves to the elements,
our papers to pulp, our text to ink.
These floods swallow whatever we think.

A few questions for readers. What do you think of the two versions of the poem? What is your own editorial process for trying to learn your craft better?

It’s an animated poetry reading of a poem from my book, Barbies at Communion: “Prayer for the Pompadour Looking Up From My Plate.” Enjoy.

The waterfall from the Waterfall Apartment.

First, a little context. This past weekend, I spend some time at a Laity Lodge retreat leading three days of poetry workshops alongside Earl Palmer, Dan Blazer, Ashley Cleveland, Kenny Greenberg, Meg Lowry, and Mike Lundy.

Earl Palmer is a fantastic preacher and speaker. He taught about wisdom in the book of Proverbs. In contrast, Dan Blazer, the head of Psychiatry at Duke University taught us about wisdom in Ecclesiastes, with a tremendous amount of insight from his profession. Ashley and Kenny are just both the epitome of cool.

In the afternoons, Meg, Mike, and I led creative arts. Meg taught block printing. Mike taught tennis and birding. (That’s a form of physical art and, um, natural art. Mike is a superb tennis instructor and a genuinely good man.) I taught poetry–emphasizing haiku this time in a way that I’ve not done before. It’s a form that I am really falling in love with, though my haiku are quite a bit different from Ryan Mecum’s. (Ryan is a minister for Young Life, and I’m working with him to write some articles for TheHighCalling.org in time for Halloween 2010.)

Yesterday L. L. Barkat asked for poems of place. Here’s a crazy little sonnet that came out of a haiku:

Texas Tree Poker

Texas scrub oak and Mountain Juniper grow
together along the river, roots tight
in the rocky soil. Every Friday night
trees fan out a deck of cards,
like tricky Vegas dealers, dealing them low,
5 hands of Texas Hold ‘Em out of sight
from the other trees. Ante up. Bidding starts right
off, high stakes tonight because tomorrow they mow.
Our grassy shirts and sleeves will be cut short,
our trunks like necks will rise naked from the dirt
almost, after their machine blades are done.
But tonight we play, we deal, we risk and poor’s
the loser who bluffs himself until he’s first
to lose his shirt in the dew of the morning sun.

Photograph, “BOLDer Adult Retreat at Laity Lodge,” by bobgjohnson.

But nearly everyone I know wants to be some kind of leader. We like to blaze trails. We like to walk in front of the sheep. We like to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and strike out for glory and honor.

If we push that too far, we can find ourselves in a bad place. In the Saint Cripen’s Day Speech, Shakespeare’s King Henry V puts it this way:

If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive.

Sometimes, we do covet honor and position to the point of sin. But desiring to lead isn’t a sin, especially when it manifests itself in the truest form of leadership—service.

If I want honor–and let me just confess right now that I do!–then I must lead the way by putting my own neck on the line, by going out in front of the troops, by serving in the places where no one wants to serve, working the hours no one wants to work, accepting the assignments no one wants to accept, and being content to let God do his mighty thing.

See, even though I want honor for myself, I don’t work to receive honor for myself. I mean, I do, but I shouldn’t. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t. Instead, I would always work in a way that gives honor to God and reserves none for myself. I don’t know what that means in practice exactly. I know it is more than stamping fish on my business cards or dropping Christian-eze into my chit-chat with phrases like God blessed our business meeting and God told me this morning to reject this article.

I edit sites about faith and work, but listen, that doesn’t mean I’ve got this stuff all figured out. I don’t. I keep plugging away like everyone else. I have bad days and weeks and months, and sometimes, God help me, I have bad years. But I keep showing up, and I trust that perseverance to finish is more important than my daily standing in the race.

If you need a bit of inspiration, Henry V’s St. Crispen’s Day speech is a perfect pick-me-up!

Note: This article is inspired by the intro to the FaithInTheWorkplace.com newsletter that goes out tomorrow. Those are unsigned, but I write them. So I’m only plagiarizing myself here.

Photograph, “Knight in shining armor” by Daleberts, used under a Creative Commons license.

If you’re interested, you can read about how someone falls into writing, how that turned professional for me, what poems inspired and continue to inspire, where poems come from (at least when I write them), and how some of the weirder poems are received by the people who receive them as gifts.

Read my new interview at Tweet Speak Poetry.