Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

-- William Stafford

"Ask me whether what I have done is my life" is the kind of line that can slide too quickly past, mesmerizing us with its cadence but never transforming the way we view the world around us. But what about you? Is your life defined by the things you have done? Should it be? And if we are not measured by the doing, then how are we loved and deemed worthy by our Creator?

Remember that James reminds us continually of the necessary connection between doing and motivation, between the why of our actions and our heart place:

Anyone who sets himself up as “religious” by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.-- James 1:26-27

What, then, about the silent river and the stillness hold true -- the steadiness of a life well-lived?

William Stafford was a professor at Lewis & Clark College who served as Oregon's Poet Laureate from 1975 to 1990. On the day he died at his Lake Oswego home in 1993, Stafford wrote these lines:

You don't have to

prove anything.

Just be ready

for what God sends.

Are you still proving yourself to those around you, or are you standing with open hands, ready for what God will send? He is there in the current, there in the comings and goings, there in the stillness of early spring.