Poems

Here's some poems I came across recently that I thought were very uplifting. In short, they spoke to my soul, and I hope they speak to yours as well.

From all my lame defeats and oh! Much more

From all the victories that I seemed to score;

From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf

At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;

From all my proofs of Thy divinity,

Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead

Of Thou, their thin-worn image of Thy head.

From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,

O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.

Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye,

Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.

~Clive Staples Lewis

“This life, therefore, is not righteousness,

but growth in righteousness,

not health but healing,

not being but becoming,

not rest but exercise.

We are not yet what we shall be,

but we are growing toward it;

the process is not yet finished,

but it is going on.

This is not the end, but it is the road;

All does not yet gleam in glory,

but all is being purified.”

~Martin Luther

O Lord, against this bosom blast

Of coiled and seething feelings,

Batt’ring passions, ebbing yearnings,

Oozing ache of inner man,

Raise Thou the flinty walls of stuff of

which Thy son was made.

Yea, build in me the buttressed

bastions of faith

That shall resist the undersucking flow

of soulish tide,

And make me to endure this late attack,

I pray in Jesus’ name.

~ Jim Elliot