return…
This poem was written for the dedication of The Potter’s Inn at Aspen Ridge. My thoughts were prompted by those lines in Revelation, those lettered-tears: you’ve forsaken your first love. The question that arose, for me, was ‘what about God’s first love?’
Return Could solving the riddle of returning to our first love lie somewhere in the middle of His? Clearly the genesis climax is ‘let us make man’ but we were not first, there were others before us, others with little need for adulation: lavender columbines and lark buntings, quaking aspen and cutthroat trout, scarlet paintbrush and bighorn sheep, blue spruce and hairstreak butterflies. A red barn rests tucked in the arms of God’s first love, an inn for those weary of confrontation, a place to practice an unfamiliar patience, to remember the oldest virtue – our Father’s affection.
This is good John. In fact, it’s so good it made me want to visit the Inn and see God’s first. If’n you tell me there’s cutthroat on the premises (especially the little kind that fight for their lives), I might’n swing that way.