my offensive Beloved

what is this tragic mercy, this divine sickness that compels me to hope? i'm condemned to an intangible optimism that requires staking every last object of my affection, every sensible pleasure and every delighted love outside the door of my death. doubt is a luxury too expensive for this vagabond who's hurled each coin of the thirty at his feet. the one whom i desire is the one from i would most often rather hide my face. he is my offensive Beloved. i cannot tear my eyes from his conflicting gaze. his glorious power and shameful weakness draw me to his vanished body. alone, my very breath betrays the substance of shattered hope. quaking here in timid assurance, i know beyond understanding that my Redeemer lives. when the universe has been incinerated, he will stand upon my earth. when this corpse has rotted to nothing and all memory of my life has passed from time, then, in my flesh, i will behold my God. i, keith ernest dow, will see him with these eyes - i, not another! oh how this fragile heart yearns within me.

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watch my language?

i have to say, sometimes swearing is so ridiculous it's downright humorous. one is particularly aware of this as a Christian. countless times people have apologized to me for swearing in my presence, as though i'm so holy that i can't be in the presence of such talk or i'll melt. at the same time, this is usually a relief, because it's difficult to communicate when every other word contributes nothing to the conversation except to make me well aware that the person i'm talking to has a vocabulary less than that of a three-year-old. then there's the other side of the coin - people who swear around me purposefully because i'm a Christian. somehow, one of the guys on my highschool bus in Northern Ontario learned that i had never used profanity, and promptly felt called to dedicate his life to causing me to curse. "just once, come on," he'd say. i could do nothing but smile. there was absolutely no reason that i could think of why i would want ...

smelly things

remember those scratch-and-sniff things? of course they still exist, but i haven't smelled one in a while. now all we have are those horrid cardboard car scents: those leaves of aesthetic tragedy. the one i'm thinking of has a strawberry scent. it might have been strawberry shortcake - that little red-headed girl with strawberries painted all over her ginormous hat, a hat ten times the size of her head. this reminds me of those markers you can buy that smell, too, often like berries of some sort. i can remember the blueberry ones the best. which scents do you remember? when Jodi and i (and sometimes Justin, Dan, Kaia or some other participant) would take empty milk jugs and stealthily place them on Mark Vust's doorstep (our Resident Director), i would sometimes smell the rotting milk. it didn't smell good. i'll give you that. but it was certainly a powerful scent. smelling things reminds me of how much i love life. like when i'm in a forest ...

one me at a time

"I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something I can do." -Edward Everett Hale "i am going to make a lasting difference with my life!" "what idiocy," frail keith scoffs. "who am i to change this world, a planet upon which there is nothing new under the sun?" faithful keith timidly responds, "with men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." i know that frail keith will likely have the upper hand again soon. this is my tragic flaw, my achilles' heel: Frailty imprisons Faith and tosses him in a prison of apathy, scorning and taunting, "who do you think you are, to dream of living a life beyond you?" then, licking my wounds in my hypnosis of self-pity and hopeless abandonment, i hear a still, small voice whispering, "beloved Littlefaith, why do you doubt...

random anxieties of existence

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