This winter I had to ask a lot of friends for help through a round of figuring out what I wanted to do when I grew up. It was, a fight, I guess, to surrender my love, my talents, my business, my creativity to the will of God. It was amazing how much energy it took. I know that at some points I got sucked into this state of confusion and evil and uncertainty and vulnerability. One of my friends told me that when I get confused and lost in the doubt, I have to ask in Jesus’ name to banish the spirit of confusion. So I wrote The Fog Poem to tell me how to do this for next time.
Max Hairshed at our wedding. If we could love God as much as our dogs love us, maybe we could have the trust I look for in The Fog Poem.
My friends are saying my poems are prayers. It took me a long time to feel like I could trust God for guidance. It’s terrifying to trust so much when I have been self-sufficient so long. A while ago I wrote The Pitbull Poem about needing to achieve to feel like a person of worth. Yet as a Christian I can know that God values me just as I am. There came a point where I got too tired to fight the evil that was telling me I was worthless, and at just that point my friend Debra told me a story about a time she’d felt that way. “I just had to recite in my head, ‘blood of Jesus, body of Jesus,’ over and over,” she said. “I was just too tired to do anything else.”
The pitbull poem was the one stuck in my head when this friend wanted to pray for me one Tuesday at a class. I think it’s about all the ego and fear and toughness and driving to achieve that I have to start letting God take away. The Pitbull Poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
And so this next poem, The Fog Poem, is the follow up, or the next generation or version of that idea:
The Fog Poem
If I could sit in this Fog and call out to my God maybe it would lift.
The shadows shifting, malicious and twisting, poking indecision into all my existing,
The despair heavy upon me, I don’t even know how to keep going on clean
Confusion challenging me, illusion moving way too malleably, my dreams defusing down
Into this pit where I don’t even want to move any longer,
This acid fog eating into my bones, I’m falling down as they crumble,
Facedown and pleading, nothing left I can do.
No way out of this but through this, The hardest thing of all to ask for help,
admit I’m caught again, beat again, by the same old deadly mist I thought I knew this,
So I suck up my final power to share my misery and weakness, reach out,
With the very last piece of my mind unbreached by damaging destruction and doubt,
And with a gasp, I find hands warm there in the fog, showing a way to a clearing,
How God was there all along, he was carrying freely, never been more near me,
Waiting for there to be less of me so there could be more of Him,
He answered.
He fought for me, brought a release, a new way to be free with more peace,
Stillness to my heart cracking with overwhelming love, amazing new life,
And each time I live it more, the fog becomes something I have power to endure
Sit in the darkness and say, “Here I am Lord.”
Even if my brains are scrambled, exhaustion beyond the manageable in my dreams and their demand pull,
And I’m dragged back into the Fog, I just have to call out to my God.
-Corinna West
Do you have any maps out of trouble like The Fog Poem?