I will be the first to admit that my skills with writing poetry extend no further than the above title. Reading poetry has always seemed a bit beyond me as well. I will read a classic piece and my response is usually, “wow”, but I can never figure out why I said wow. I know that beauty and love and sometimes other deep emotions are being expressed but I can’t grasp the depths of it. Perhaps it is because the truth and beauty shared is so rich and pure that we just aren’t accustomed to hearing such goodness in our hearts (remember this sentence in just a minute and you might just have a little revelation). And the rules with writing poetry! I think I must have skipped school on all the days that those things were taught in English class. It’s all rather confusing to me.

In Chapter two of the book of Ephesians, Paul begins to explain how God is going to accomplish His purposes in the world. In verse 10 Paul says, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Some might read those words and quickly jump and decide that God is telling us to get busy and do a whole bunch of stuff. Before you run off to make a plan, slow down just a second. Everything God has ever done or said has been intentional. Nothing left to chance, nothing random. Intentional. In that verse the word workmanship in Greek is Poiema. It is the word where we derive the word poem. Listen to what God intended when He spoke through Paul, we are God’s poetry. Yep, just sit with that for a minute.

Now, remember the sentence you read above that I told you to hold on to? Could you entertain the idea that God wants to use you and me to share His rich, pure beauty and truth with all the hearts around us that aren’t ever accustomed to such goodness? He doesn’t want us to write the poetry, He wants us to be the poetry. He wants the hardened hearts and broken hearts in the world to see Him through us and be set free. It’s so simple and mind-blowingly beautiful!

There is a problem though! If we are the paper, parchment, canvas, computer screen, book, etc., that He writes His beauty and love upon, we’ve got to see ourselves the way He sees us or what we give others to read will be our shame, guilt, inadequacies, and brokenness and will have nothing of His Glory in it for anyone to see.

Would you dare to step beyond your own short-sightedness and stop idolizing your own limitations and allow the King Himself to write beauty into your life? To write freedom into your life? To write love into your life? To write truth into your life? There is a whole world all around us that has never seen Beauty or Truth. Perhaps you yourself have never seen the real Beauty and Truth. The amount of His Beauty and Truth that you will display is directly proportional to the amount of it you can see in yourself.

For we are God’s poetry. May we allow Him to write upon our lives.