What Is It?



Is it the loneliness or the darkness,
which makes the silence echo so loud?
Is it not having to wait on someone’s every whim?
Is it now knowing, you’re not giving in?
Is it being able to have your own freedom to be,
and do what you like?
Is it knowing that wisdom
has not shot you down the pike?

Is it the disappointment that he is not the person
you always dreamed he would be?
Or is it the cold, hard reality, that the stranger you now see,
is actually the real he?
Is it the thought of starting all over alone?
Or is it the reality of knowing that
you’re only supposed to be one?

Is it the pain or the anger
that holds you back,
or pushes you on?

Is it the venom of the snake’s actual bite,
or the anticipation of it’s locked jaws on your ankle,
that makes your skin cold?

Is it true love and humbleness
that makes you take the mean shots,
or an inner strength
that creates the presence a bigger person
to survive
when you’re not?

Fortunately, it is the same conflicts and crisis that break us,
that if we grasp on to them, and embrace them,
hold them close until they become
a comfort, and comfortable to us,
also makes us a person of character,
of fortitude, of wisdom, and trust.

The fine line between the weak and the strong,
the hero and the coward,
the true Spirit of God,
or the babbling rhetoric of a manipulator,
is so very close in content and consistency,
it takes a veteran of both to clearly see
the differentiations and heed the dangers,
to rely on our Lord, humbly born in a manger.

Is it the pure irony of life’s challenges and trials,
that decide who is to win and who is to fail?

Is it fate or destiny that chooses,
Who is the one that it’s going to be,
to strive, to learn, to succeed, or to fail;
to fall or rise in the face of challenge,
or who will land in jail?

One day, we’ll know, our real situation,
but at first we’ll glance at it
and say, “No, it isn’t my nation.”
I don’t believe what has come to be,
Tell me why, the sooner it did not show,
and why, oh why,
why didn’t I know?

But just as in all these things,
it comes true ,
the hand of death will surely reach through,
the curtain of time and pure energy,
to point it’s dreaded finger, as you find out,
it’s over, it’s me!

But by then, it’s too late.
By then we will all flounder;
when we’re finally called “home”,
to the arms of our Founder.

But then, it won’t matter,
the pain and the hurt.
No, then we won’t chatter,
about the gossip and dirt.

Because we will all be healed wholly,
in mind, body, and spirit;
we’ll all be forgetting
those long nights lost in Europe.

Goodbye is always a sad one,
for the one left behind,
however it happens,
we are no longer blind.
We see it all clearly,
the years passed and gone.
Now hope for a voice
for which to sing out a great song.

Of freedom, and laughter,
and bodies healed wholly,
of lives all fulfilled,
and hopefully, ending in glory.