The God I Came Back To

I used to know the road to God,
Or thought I knew it well;
The steeple cut the morning sky,
And every bell could tell.

I knew the prayers before they came,
The hymns, the bread, the wine;
I thought belief was something held,
And what I held was mine.

The world seemed fastened at its joints,
The stars stayed where they ought;
The dead were gathered into grace,
The wandering were sought.

And when they told me, “God is good,”
I never questioned why;
I had not stood beside a grave
And heard a mother cry.

I had not watched a faithful man
Grow smaller in his bed,
Nor heard the prayers grow desperate
Around the dying head.

I had not learned how silence sounds
When heaven will not speak,
How long a night can make the soul,
How tired it makes the meek.

But there are fires that find the beams
Beneath the painted wall,
And there are questions small as sparks
That live to burn it all.

Mine came without a trumpet blast,
No devil spoke my name;
I simply found one winter night
I could not feed the flame.

The answers I had carried once
Were ashes on my tongue;
The hymns I knew by heart became
The bones of songs once sung.

I opened Scripture looking for
The God I used to know,
And found blood crying from the ground
And graves that would not close.

I found the righteous asking why,
The prophets bruised and torn;
I found a Christ who begged the cup
Be taken before morn.

And something in me broke at last,
Not with a shout, but deep,
The way a frozen river cracks
Beneath a town asleep.

I could not call the darkness good,
Or name the horror plan;
I could not praise a Providence
I could not understand.

So I walked out and shut the door.
No angel barred my way;
No thunder rolled behind my back.
The sky remained its grey.

The traffic moved. The kettle boiled.
Rain silvered every stone.
The ordinary world went on,
And I went on alone.

And God—if God was anywhere—
Was quiet as the dust;
And every certainty I had
Lay underneath mistrust.

For years I lived beside that ruin,
Sometimes I called it peace;
No sermons threatening the dark,
No begging for belief.

I learned the names of other things,
I learned to doubt a claim;
I learned that saying “I don't know”
Need carry neither shame.

I learned a question honestly
May be a kind of light;
That truth, if truth is truly truth,
Need never fear the night.

And still, some evenings passing by
A church, I heard them sing—
Not beautifully, not like saints,
But like frail human things.

A child came half a beat behind,
An old man breathed too hard,
A widow gripped the pew before her
Like a final guard.

Someone coughed through the final verse,
Someone forgot a line;
Someone bowed a weary head
Above the bread and wine.

And something hurt inside of me
Because their hope endured;
Not clean, not certain, not untouched,
But somehow still assured.

I hated that I wanted it.
I hated wanting home;
I'd fled a house consumed by fire—
Why turn again toward smoke?

Yet faith returned by little things,
Not arguments of flame:
A loaf divided at a table,
Someone who knew my name.

A friend who did not answer me
When answers would have lied,
Who sat beside my unbelief
And did not leave my side.

A priest who said, “I do not know,”
And did not look away;
A psalm that gave my anger words
I had been scared to pray.

A winter branch against the moon,
Cold water, candle wax;
The strange discovery that God
Might not be scared of facts.

And Christ—not Christ triumphant first,
Not Christ above the pain,
But Christ with frightened, sweating flesh
Beneath the olive rain.

Christ asking friends to stay awake,
Then finding them asleep;
Christ entering the human night
Where frightened creatures weep.

Christ beaten underneath the sun,
Christ staggering beneath
The timber of a world in which
The innocent still bleed.

Christ nailed into the fact of pain,
With iron through His hands;
Not giving suffering an excuse,
But suffering where man stands.

Christ saying, “Why?” into the dark
Where no reply was heard;
And heaven, for that dreadful hour,
Not answering with a word.

That was the God I could approach,
The God who bore the scar;
Not one who watched our agony
Unwounded from afar.

Not one who called the burning good
Because some hidden end
Would make the agony worthwhile
And all the ruin mend.

Not one who needed me to lie
About the grave's great cost,
Or asked that resurrection mean
That nothing had been lost.

But One who entered loss Himself
And would not call it small;
Whose risen hands, if risen hands,
Still bore the wounds of all.

And there—I cannot tell you when—
The road beneath me turned;
I had not conquered doubt at all,
Nor raised what had been burned.

I only walked among the beams,
Through everything undone,
Until beneath the ash I saw
One coal outlive the sun.

I knelt, but not as once I knelt,
When certainty came down;
No sudden choir split the roof,
No glory filled the ground.

The room remained an ordinary room,
The window streaked with rain;
I had no revelation there,
No answer for my pain.

I only said, “If You are there,
I cannot come as him—
The boy who thought belief meant never
Seeing heaven dim.

“I cannot give You innocence,
I cannot unknow graves;
I cannot call the cruel thing good
Because somebody prays.

“I cannot promise nevermore
To question what is true;
But if You still will have me, God,
I think I still want You.”

And nothing moved. The room stayed room.
The radiator sighed;
A car went hissing through the rain,
Somewhere a baby cried.

But I remained there on my knees,
And that itself was new;
I had no certainty of God,
Yet somehow I stayed too.

Perhaps that was the first belief
I had not inherited:
Not knowing God was surely there,
But choosing not to flee.

And slowly prayer became less speech
Than learning to be known;
Less climbing toward a distant throne
Than finding I was home.

Not home because the questions died,
Or every wound was healed;
But home because I ceased demanding
Everything be sealed.

Grace had been there before my strength,
Before return, the road;
Before my hands reached out for God,
I had been somehow held.

And I am not the man I was,
Nor would I be again;
That man had never watched belief
Go black beneath the rain.

I do not have his easy faith.
I could not if I tried;
Some questions entered through the wound
And made their home inside.

They live there still. I bring them now.
I bring the books I've read;
I bring the nights when prayer feels false,
I bring the nameless dead.

I bring the anger I once thought
A faithful man should hide;
I bring my mind. I bring my doubt.
God does not wait outside.

And some days faith is fire again,
And some days scarcely breath;
Some days I sing resurrection,
Some days I stop at death.

Some days the bread is only bread,
The wine is only wine;
Some days the whole created world
Seems trembling with divine.

I do not need to force the rain
To prove that God is there;
The rain may simply still be rain,
And still I call it fair.

A tree may simply still be wood,
The stars be burning spheres;
And knowing what a thing is made of
Need not make it disappear.

The grave may simply be a grave,
And death remain our foe;
I need not call the darkness light
To trust the dawn may show.

For if He rose, He rose from death—
Not metaphor, not sleep;
And therefore hope need never make
The grave a thing less deep.

This is the faith that came to me
When certainty was through:
Not faith that never knew the fire,
But faith that walked it too.

I thought returning meant somehow
Becoming who I'd been,
Rebuilding every fallen wall
And making all things clean.

Instead God met me in the ash
Where no old house remained,
And did not ask me to forget
The knowledge I had gained.

We built no fortress from the wreck,
No tower against the night;
We found the timber still unburned
And dragged it toward the light.

And from that black and blistered wood
We made a simple frame:
A table where I might sit down
And dare to speak His name.

There I have eaten. I have wept.
I've doubted there and prayed;
I've watched the evening gather dark
And sometimes been afraid.

There I have found that love is more
Than certainty alone;
For love can sit beside a wound
And never call it gone.

Yet truth still matters. Creed still matters.
The questions carry weight.
Love does not teach us to think less;
Love teaches us to wait.

And I am waiting even now.
I have not reached the end;
Some nights I call Him Father still,
And some nights only Friend.

Some nights I cannot call at all
And only breathe His name;
Some nights I fear the ash below
Still hides the ancient flame.

But now I know that faith is not
A glass that breaks and dies;
Perhaps it is a wounded thing
That slowly learns to rise.

Not unwounded. Never that.
The scars remain their scars;
The questions keep their honest mouths,
The darkness keeps its stars.

For resurrection does not mean
That Friday never came;
The risen body carries still
The history of the nails.

So neither must I hide the wounds
Through which my faith was torn;
Perhaps the heart that comes to God
Need not return unborn.

And I who once escaped the flames
With nothing I could save,
Have learned that love can still be love
When standing by a grave.

I came to God without the faith
I thought He would require;
I came with soot upon my hands,
Still smelling of the fire.

I came with nothing left to prove,
No certainty to show;
Only the smallest wounded hope
That I could choose to go.

And there beyond the ruined walls,
Beyond what I once knew,
I crossed the wilderness toward God—
And found He'd crossed it too.