When all went black. When all had gone
fleeing into the night of the wilderness,
you were there across the void

snickering and pointing and plotting.
You saw emptiness and broken chances.
You assumed the winds of folly carried away
the potential of distant dreams.

You didn’t know how to grow.
You didn’t know how to feed. You only knew
how to leave roots starving in the dark,

but you didn’t know the richness of dirt
or the power of nothing.
You didn’t know you plowed the soil
as you walked away in your trampling.

You thought you left me dying and alone,
but you didn’t hear the mockingbirds God sent
to sing cadences of hope over the treasure
He buried.

You didn’t know because I never told you
the garden in my soul God had already sown,

but I already knew the web of you.
I watched through tears as you tried to poison me
in lies and drown me in rejection and schemes.
I cried, not because you broke me,
but because I already knew the life that would sprout

and the weeping of your future reaping.

I knew you didn’t know
that you were the one being caught
and that God used your battle against yourself
to water the seeds of truth that would flow
like rivers of life through the veins of me,
His wisdom of liquid gold
that would saturate wounds of cracked earth,

all from a life transformed through death
that was activated by your desert winds of neglect and refined inside your silent storm of suffering.