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| Church at Rensselaer, Missouri |
Photo: Kent Durk.
Used by permission.
Used by permission.
Kent Durk's website is www.360icon.com
Postcard from a Country Church
James Hart
“Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow
speak
what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it
contradict
every thing you said today.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson,
“Self-Reliance”
Having listened to Jesus’ words describing salvation
through communion
of bread and blood, “Many
therefore of his disciples, when they had heard
this, said, ‘This
is a hard saying; who can hear it?’” John 6:60, KJV
Hard
words fell here from Sunday sermons a century ago.
Men
harvested fortitude from Bibles in glove-soft covers,
women
harbored the words of God they heard like hail
hammered
on tin rooftops, trouble for sheltered souls.
The
bell’s early anthems called them to the door: darker
dirges
sent them with coffin’s exodus to the muddied yard.
The
bearers gripped the handles hard when they heard
winter’s
wind bring down judgment from words of rain,
widows’
tears embraced their emptiness. Infant death held
the
weight of the world’s hard burdens laid down deep
beneath
tablets of protective stone. A few fathers led their
defiled
daughters up the aisle, white dresses hiding hard
truths
of sullied brides, weddings shadowed by awkward
smiles
on baptismal days. Yes, they bore their days’ granite
truths
scripted in hardened words; they praised their God
and
trusted how salvation’s savor raised their eyes skyward.
February
17, 2013
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