I wrote the following poem about a girl who’s family became involved with my childhood church through a ministry to single mothers. It was written after she and I sat together at a Maundy Thursday service almost four years ago.

I’m run-ragged by the end of the school year haze and weekends of graduation and interviews and preparation to move. As I flipped through shards of poetry I’ve written over the years, I found this. I want to share it now because so often I feel like this girl, twisting and turning in the pews, unable to grasp full theological meaning or understand the pain of this broken world. Yet even in those moments, I am reminded of the awesomeness and complexity of a God who loves us, one who wasn’t made, but made the universe itself. So today, I clung to this reminder that God is in control. The God who is in control made me, and Oklahoma, and Boston, and everything.

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How was God made?

She looks up
At the snowflake ceiling and the saints reflecting in the windows,
Painstakingly writing her reflections and confessions.
Twisting and
Turning, crossing her legs
Readjusting to write more.
“How was God made? That’s what i wrote on that paper: How was God made? I know God made everything.”

What do the yellow words say?
By yellow words, she means the responses of the congregation to the forgiveness of sins.

Oh, she says, will you help me read them?

I was busy looking for this paper because it was in the small bible,
The brown one with the cursive cross.
That’s God’s word, she says.

She runs wild and screams,
And yet,
This Maundy Thursday,
She asks
How was God made?