Thrasher's Call

Glass shatters under cracking blows as my viewpoint is discarded. The shards weep sorrowful blue dye, and I die inside again.

I try once more, desperate to find, through brighter hues, the emerald peace of being understood. Rejecting blows interject without a second glance, and as my overturned perspective splinters a second time, my stomach turns in the familiar way, and I see my vibrant greens take on the nauseated chartreuse of hopelessness. My eyes glaze; my unregarded soul hides behind its clouded windows.

I break. No deep blues I depict can ever abate the anger who will see nothing but red. I privately trace the fault lines, and know now that not all the fault is mine.

Alone, I am ashen. Of course there are cracks; why shouldn’t I feel breaks and pains? The world is broken, after all, so it just follows that I must get broken too.

But in the cloudbreak of later years, I see these cracks allow the Son’s light to shine through. I try to cultivate them to see more brightly, and to refract the light through my panes so that its rays can unwind into luminous threads of many colors; I remember the purpose for Joseph’s prison, and think of how, when at last elevated, he reflected on his own prismatic role in casting the barley-golden rays of God’s provision.

I learn to cast companion blues into pools of cerulean sorrow, so they can shine across the paths of others who feel they walk alone, to prove to them that they never will.

I learn to succor sickly despair-green into the verdant fields of the Lion’s land, to the pastures of the Lamb, and know He’ll lay me there.

I’ve lost the safety of an uncruel world, but gained His stained glass in my soul. So through the pains that stain my panes, may the Son illuminate the reliefs of graces past.