God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

Yesterday a friend of mine, Joel, asked me who my favorite writer is. And my mind went blank. Well, not really blank, but cloudy. In that moment I thought of a couple but then was wondering if I would call either my favorite. Rainer Maria Rilke was the first person I thought of. He would for sure be right up there. And Christina Rossetti in the top five for sure. Both poets. I love poetry that paints for me a word picture that I can step in to and at once be a part of and experience. Poems also allow me to wrestle with interpretation and application to my walk with God. Other forms do that as well, but there’s something about poetry… for me. I can read e.e. cummings, and Langston Hughes and poems like Robert Frost ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and see God in there, calling me to come near and know Him better. Calling me to wonder.

“There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush.
When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, ‘Moses! Moses!'”
— Exodus 3:2, 4

We all know the scene from Exodus. What is your burning bush? Through what form do you really find yourself connecting most intimately with God? Music? Poetry? Walks in nature? Whatever it is, may God continually bless you with a hunger for that vehicle.

PS: Whether or not it will be my next book after these first two, I do not know, but I will put together a book of my own poetry and prose that I have written.