Why Have You Sent Us?

From Ann Glover O’Dell’s Midwifing the Soul:

Why have you sent us

to this foreign land?

clothed these fragile organs

            in this too thin flesh

so we wake daily

wondering if they will

keep our life?

given us great fear

of hidden things

and places we have not yet seen?

put strong minds in us

that seek control

only to unsettle our rigidity?

Are we the tourists stranded

in a Canaan desert

with camels not for hire

and oases only a mirage?

What sort of strife-torn

place like this

could make its residents content?

Or was this all planned out

so we would cry at last

“Bring me home!”?

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