All by Luci Shaw

True-ing

True-ing

Luci Shaw
Crafty, Truth

I am no carpenter. But my doctor son, with a degree in tropical medicine, volunteers for a humanitarian agency in Burma, exercising his skills with bodies and souls. He is also a poet and artist. His hobby, and a way of calming his mind and expressing his sense of shape and beauty in the midst of suffering and destitution, is to find odd pieces of wood and fashion from them objects beautiful or useful, exposing the wood's inherent quality. Tables, chairs, bowls, spoons! He’s skilled with a scalpel, either on human bodies or on the striated muscles of something that used to be a tree.

Without knowing it, he has given me a metaphor to live by—the sizing up of my trajectory in life.

The Forensics of Identity

Luci Shaw
Bookish, Truth

We may ask ourselves, how are we Christ-imprinted? What is God calling us to do and be as we stand awed and fearful before some significantly burning bush? What needs to happen for us to receive some kind of stigmata — some signals that mark us as Christ’s own. Not, perhaps, the bloody wounds in the palms of the hands, but the pure, open, joyful, and contrite heart that God has promised to claim for Himself, to not despise, and to count as more valuable to Him than any human accomplishment and success.

Undeserved Suffering

Luci Shaw
Truth

Once a week they arrive at our church. We sit them down at a table with us, one by one, our guests, longing to be Jesus to them, to assist in the miracles of change by the power of His Spirit. Their poverty is immediate and unmediated. We are eye to eye, hand to hand with them. There is no mistaking the grime on the skin, the stink of the unwashed, the flush of fever, the glazed eyes of the whacked out. This is no abstraction, no theoretical sociological condition. They are marked indelibly by their deprivation. They want a life for themselves and for their children, but where can it be? The sense of the impossible overwhelms them.

What the Morning Says to Her

Luci Shaw
Truth
I have a wonderful doctor, who always treats me with affection and skill, but as I sat in the waiting room I’d wondered what she could possibly recommend next. At 84, just when one ailment gets fixed — with a new knee, hearing aids, glasses, medication — something else is bound to go. It’s become a kind of routine.

I was overdue for help, both physical and spiritual. And there she was, this small anonymous messenger from God.

The Hopefulness of Beauty

Luci Shaw
Truth
The arrival of a new idea or image for a poem propels me into such a fervor that my body feels exalted along with my mind. So much is wrong with the world, but so much of it is right, particularly the parts that seem to have spilled directly from the Creator’s hand! What are the chances that when I was born I would turn out to be me, to have the astonishing chances and choices I’ve had? Beauty, in any form or color, makes me sing and have hope. Can I ever be thankful enough?