Ode to a Missionary's Crocs

With hiking poles they clapped their soles
while strapped to backpacking sacks, and sang
their marching song with softer note to cookstove
cooked soup and tired heels and toes
rose-colored with climbing, walking, comforting
them cozy-like. Somedays, crocing, they slid
on mud amid puddles, squeaking wet and
clean with cold--but cradling feet in such a way,
contagiously congenial.

When winter whipped a fire-red
sheen across cheeks and stiffened beards
with beads of frosted snow, they worked with wool
and warmly wiped the windy blusters off and swept
them skating out through open windows, snuggling
about the chilly feet a lullaby of soft sole and
curving length sprinkled with holes.
Travelers, they lately tromped amongst trials
and children, sharing smiles despite a thinning
life of labor, flying with fever-relievers and bearing
help to souls by bearing him.


Faithful, they, even when holing, forbearing
several rocks only to bruise and black his arch, doing what
a pair of recycled tire bits, rough, dark, blistering, though trusty,
will never do.

A Few Much-Loved and Delightfully-Unified Scraps Finally Become Colorfully Warm

Drippings

"All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness. . . ." --Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

As I have looked this week at the results of an icestorm, I have seen thousands of frozen droplets dangling like crystals from saplings and fences. I have felt the cold hardening my gloved fingers and even overcoming the fluffed-out warmth of the little Arabian horse between my knees. I have slid down our dirt road on the heels of my shoes, spun up icy sections of pavement with my car, and punched through tough crusts. I have felt my misty breath come back in my face, and seen the white frost bristling my mum's eyebrows after a forty-five minute walk. But unlike this frozen region and these droplets, caught mid-drip into a hard tooth of ice, there are musical and spring-like drippings, nay, torrents of joy drenching me. They have not been sealed up, like these wires, in icy cases; they have not been confined by shortened sunlight, or buried, like the Reeses Peanut-Butter-Cup wrapping I found, underneath six inches of sodden snow. And due to their Source, neither will they be.

The Puzzle of Stickers

You are so proud the day your teacher gives you a gold star sticker for your brightness. It stays on your clothes all day, but when you try to attach it the next day, it falls, its points curling, onto the floor where it promptly finds your brother's shoe and hangs out on the bottom for a couple of days. Not to worry. The next weekend your grandmother tucks a whole sheet of smiling horse and leaping turtle stickers into your birthday card, and your friend gives you a whole book of global frogs, carefully labeled and realistically colored. They're pretty and shiny and stickable. They're yours. But you discovered when you were three that they rip easily, and by four that they can only be stuck successfully once (most happily on a wall until your collection is discovered and you receive a gentle spanking). By five you sometimes considered the consequences of sticking them, and by six you became stingy, only occassionally sacrificing a whole colony at once. Now you have a whole box of sticker sheets--fuzzy ones, sparkly ones, big ones, small ones--that you are too cautious to use randomly, and not dedicated enough to organize.

Sometimes you decorate your mirror corners, but then you get sick of them and ambitiously try to remove them, only being successful at removing the pretty parts. When you give a friend a card, sometimes you are generously motivated to seal it with a special sticker, but when you get such envelopes yourself, you find that they open funny. So you stick a few on your desk and discover that white remains are no nicer there than on your mirror. You try keeping them in your drawer, but no visitor gets terribly excited over a dusty and yellowing sticker collection. One day you put one on your nose, and then are struck with a creativity of simply throwing them out. Your mom finds them while you are at school and puts them back on your bed. When you get home, you are busy for several hours smothering a poster board with them, and then try to sneak the project into the recycling bin--they have been used their lucky once and they are finished--but someone inevitably cannot bear to see them go. The hideous poster ends up back in your room and you only used one hundredth of your collection to make it.

Finally, you try an extravagant approach: A sticker's life is apparently long, so make the most of it. You start your collection on mom's filing cabinet where she can keep them, where they are not being wasted by lack of usage, and where everyone can gloat about their cheap beauty. Who knows? Maybe your grandbabies will get excited about them, manage to rip a few of them cleanly off, and eat them. And not even a clique of stickers can stick long in a baby's digestive system.