Please God
Before I feared God
You could say or do
Just about anything to me
And I would respond
No big deal
Because, like most people pleasers
I had a deal with the devil–
In exchange for letting the devil get away with anything
The devil maintained my illusion of control
It was illusory since
Through trying to control others
By pleasing them
I wasn’t pleasing God
I was trying to control Him
And thereby pleasing the devil
By doing exactly what the devil would have me
But God, who can’t be controlled
Wasn’t having it
So, He sent me my wife
Who can’t be controlled
And who, crucially
Is much harder to please than the devil
The natural progression would have been
To come to fear my wife
And try to control her
Of course, I tried
But I may as well have tried
Controlling the weather
So, I projected my fear onto the weather
And called it climate change while refusing to change myself
As I grasped for still more control
Time passed, and eventually and inevitably
Everything I had spent a lifetime trying to control
Spun out of control
But my wife
For years the chaotic yet constant weather of my life
Now became my shelter from the storm
In that shelter, I faced a choice–
The devil’s offer was still on the table:
Everything could continue exactly as I always feared it would
And an illusion would be summoned
Making it all seem like
No big deal
But then I noticed–
Perhaps my wife pointed it out to me–
That on the table sat a light
With seven branches
And next to the light sat a book
Every book asks a question–
Will you open it?
But this one asked–
Are you open to me?
I turned to look at my wife
Standing next to the table
And in the light of the menorah
At last I saw my soul
And opened the book
It’s a big deal
All of it
