when all you’ve got is faith…(audio poetry 3:25)

When all you’ve got is faith,
Faith is everything

It fills the gnawing in your belly
The aching of your heart,
Melts the lingering cold that threatens
to freeze your every expression

Faith tiptoes in and curls up in pockets
of reverberating emptiness
Gently unlocks the gates you created
to resist Faith’s entry,
Spreads without notice into tiny crevices and
gaping canyons and icy pools
Offering you a toehold on slick-walled mountains
you once deemed unassailable

When everything else is gone
Everything!
When your hungers consume your
every sleeping and waking moment,
When every map has been burned and every key
rusted beyond recognition
Faith becomes everything

When all that you have counted on
evaporates before your very eyes,
When the bleak appears to
overshadow the radiant
and the dark supposedly is overtaking the light,
When every sacred thread you attempt to grasp
slips through your calloused fingers,
When you are spinning with
no innate sense
of true north,
Feeling lost, disheartened

Faith waits for you to welcome her in,
to lean into her sturdy frame
She waits for you to drop your illusion of control
And to quell once and for all your mind’s insistence
that the past and the future continue to dominate
the omnipresent now

When you loosen your grip
on an intellectual version of Faith,
When you invite Faith to sit down by the fire
and rock you in her arms,
And you embody Faith as an integral ingredient
of your highest being,
Faith brings you a reservoir of peace
and a wellspring of courage
you never imagined you could attain.

When all you have is Faith,
You have everything.