Flowers in the Wind

I sat down at my desktop on a cold chilly morning, searching for immortality on a burgeoning sea of loneliness. Myself and a blank document. Life was, for the moment, quite empty. But my heart was full--full as an ancient bucket dipped in the lake, threatening to spill over or give way at any moment, a floodgate readily unleashed by the slightest jarring motion.

I started to write--every story I could ever remember, every feeling I called my own, every problem that had ever racked my brain. My fingers darted over the keys. They called into being mountains of suffering unsurpassed, wells of joy known to no one but myself, and glories untold. A swelling world emerged--a world more real than all else I knew. It grew and grew. A thousand pages. Five thousand. A hundred thousand. Still the mountains swelled; the wells deepened. Shadows and sunshine gathered over the landscape in sharpening points.

Presently the stories and feelings gave way to a greater consciousness: every poem I could remember, every verse of Scripture I learned as a child, every song I ever sung. I wrote them down--sometimes only three or four lines--the authentic cadence, the tune of my soul.
The words no longer flowed easily--I was grasping at any untold, unshared remnant of myself. I dutifully drilled out the dull statistics of my years, filling in the gaping chasms where my memory had nothing to offer. Academics. Work. Health, height and weight. Eyesight. Awards. Close calls and failures.

There the bucket emptied its last in an inglorious slow drip. The overflowing spring had at last run dry. My life was poured out in entirety. Every story I ever heard, every scene I remembered seeing, every deed I ever did, everything I believed, and every principle that I thought to make me who I was, now no more than a hundred thousand pages--a handful of dissonant themes sown again and again in careless haste until they could be sown no longer.

The Void returned--the great loneliness. I found that I had no desire to read what I had written. It was mere chaff; shed easily as straw in a south wind. I sat still, waiting for the change, the revelation of glory and purpose that I looked for within myself. Instead there was only silence.

Then the voice came, like a whispered poem on a breeze--like the shadow of a great rock under the scorching sun.

All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the LORD blows on it;
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.