Sometimes you need someone to give you a gentle shake. Just a few words of encouragement can go a long way. My friend Sandra gave me that this week and I am so grateful. Here are two poems I wrote a few weeks ago. I don’t feel like a ‘good’ Christian. I feel very flawed and lost in the fog of medication but there are small moments of clarity. It is God who is ‘good’ not me, it is by grace we are saved, not works. I hope these poems might be a blessing.
Tag: poetry
Taking one more step by faith
Today it was a challenge to record these poems. I haven’t been sleeping well, my mind seems to think going to bed is the signal to start planning out how to change the world or take on a new career or renovate my childhood home and turn it into a retreat. Wonderful thoughts to contemplate but not helpful when you need to go to sleep. Thank you for taking the time to share my journey, we are all imperfect works in progress, how precious is it that our God loves us just as we are.
The Journey Continues
This week has been a series of panic attacks. I have been really struggling and spent all day yesterday in my pyjamas refusing to to face reality or behave like an adult. I had my first appointment with a new psychologist on Friday. She was lovely but the stress of going over my history and diagnosis is profound. Anyway I have picked three poems to share and I hope they might be a blessing to you. Listening to them read back to me by me, is strangely moving. I know how much heartache and desperate searching and deep gut wrenching pain is behind these simple earnest words. I hope they will be a blessing to someone.
A New Poem
Daring To Share
I have been trying to get the courage up to actually record one or two of my poems and post them. I find people connect with what I am trying to express so much more when they hear it rather then just reading it. It feels like a a scary leap of faith but I got brave enough this morning, with my mum’s encouragement, to record these two poems I wrote recently. The move to a new house and the fact that I am having to see a new psychologist and psychiatrist are all things that are playing on my mind. I run to God and throw myself into his arms once again.
The Prayer of a Medicated Soul
By Cheryl Reeves 14-9-2022
Oh Lord my God
When I just try to focus
How thick the fog
That makes my windows white.
I cannot see,
Or hear you voice
Inside me.
I am so lost,
I beg you
Melt this frost.
And lift me up
From broken couches hiding,
Give me the strength
To let myself cry.
Let me with honest
Eyes wide open,
See who I am
And feel the pain I feel.
Let me be one,
As you are with your Son.
That all my parts
Share with me one heart.
Forgive me Lord
For tangents and for hiding
In endless woods
Of social media.
I long to change
To grow and be alive.
Able to move
To walk and not to fall.
To be the woman
I know that I could be.
Lord, come closer
And clear the fog for me.
How do I love you
As I would?
How do I eat and sleep
As I should?
Am I alive
To follow my own path?
Or am I here
To learn to love You true?
Day 17: The Blue Notebook
Adonai, I would make you a perfume of my own heart. I would turn it velvet, rose, rubies and musk. I would ground my own soul, burnt with fire, to make some sweet ash. The aromatic incense I would offer before your throne and with it a new song, all my love in the sweetest melodies.
Please accept my offering and draw me closer into your secret, hidden, soul, deep inside your infinite loveliness and vast perfection. Cas
She went to God in her secret heart, And shared with God her secret parts. She drew her bow and shot secret darts And longed to pierce God’s secret heart. When God she found, she fell in fear, For God is frightening if you come too near. Instead of arrows he uses a spear And he pierced her heart through her soul full clear.
“Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense;
and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.”
Day 30: Resolution
Resolution Cas Reeves 2019 This time I come as me! Though me, Be three. Though Snow and Red Both share my head, And chat away At night in bed Though Gun be son, Yet we are one. Cas, a writer now, Brave at last somehow. I do not lie. I dare to try. I write my truth, As one, Before the Father, Spirit, Son, That three, Who too, Is one.
Day 29: Little By Little
Little by Little Cas Reeves 2018 I’d like to make music for you, Lord. If I was a harp how I’d sing, For you my dear Saviour Are so much more, Then even just God, You’re my King. I fell through a hole in the ground To a lost, sad world without words But slowly I rise to my feet, You lift me a little, So gentle and kind. Somehow, I’m less lost And not out of my mind. I write a sentence, a page. Not much, no manic or rage, But perhaps what follows Will be greater than all The push and the drama Before my mind’s fall. Will my words change the world? I don’t know, But the fact that I’m here Goes to show, That little by little, Like a retuned fiddle My words are a song changing me. With my heart fit to burst I come with my thirst And sing, I have a story set free.
Day 27: Enraptured
Enraptured Cas Reeves 2005 God and God alone He holds my heart With His still small voice. His smile shining into my spiritual eyes. Transcending human love He enraptures me. Divine beyond perfection And to perfection and beyond. He is so good to me. I fall in love anew, I run to Him with all of me, The black and red and all my darkness Offered to His light. I am his, Layer upon layer for His own. He is and so I am. Such joy He gives In place of grey despair.
Cheryl Reeves Writing - from my shelves of journals 