Melting point poetry – for the spiritually frozen

Melting point

Help me let you melt me 
--When I can't feel 
--When thick layers of apathy cover an ocean of living water.
I'm sick of skating atop the surface--
Pretending I'm walking on waves. 
I've tried to break the ice myself 
--simulated religious experience to no effect.
--preached about the sea while frozen solid.
My angry axe never hits water. 
Now, I know I need you to melt me --
In the middle of my winter. 
Help me stop swinging this thirsty axe,
When you'd have given me a drink if I had asked. 
Help me let you melt me. 

I wrote this poem in church. We were singing Psalm 51 during worship:

“Create in me a clean heart, Oh God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.”

I noticed the dependency of David’s Psalm. David is asking God to change an emotional state he can’t alter himself.

In the wintertime, we have to go out and chop holes in the ice so the livestock can get a drink. They rely on me to come out with my axe and break the ice each day the water freezes. They see me in my tractor, and wait until the holes are chopped. They don’t help me, they just stare and stare and stare expectantly.

Sometimes it can be pretty strenuous, especially if you have to chop new holes in the ice. The worst thing is when you chop an entire hole only to hit dirt at the bottom. In these dry years, that’s unfortunately very common. It can take awhile. But it’s so satisfying to finally see water burst through the surface. I love to hear the final stroke of my axe crack the ice open. It’s even more satisfying to see the cows drink. They thank me by taking giant gulps of water before heading back to munch on hay. Although I don’t mind chopping ice, it’s always nice when the sun melts it for me.

In life, I often feel the onslaught of information, thoughts of self, and stress form a hard shell of apathy, and melancholia. I become unmoved by spiritual things, unexcited about my beyond blessed life. I tend to move towards melancholic moods and have always struggled with depression, so I don’t have to try to think myself into this place, it’s comfortable, like sinking into a favorite recliner. It is in these times that I need God to chop some ice, or better yet, melt me. I take it upon myself to dethaw, but I can’t. Trying makes me frustrated, resentful. I seek an intellectual, practical cure that doesn’t involve vulnerability with a God I often question is really with me or good by my definition.

I typically enter church with a spirit of resistance. I don’t want to be brainwashed. I don’t want to simulate a religious experience based off emotions. I don’t want a Christian – flavored culture, or manufactured God. I want real. But I’m here, because I know I need God’s presence. I can’t fix mental and emotional apostasy myself. I know if I just sit here and listen to the congregation sing, I will change. My spirit will resonate with something said or sang and it will change me. My spirit is set free from cynicism and doubt, and self absorbtion. I subconsciously lift my hands and am enclosed in the Spirit of God again. It’s obvious to me that this was always the cure — God’s presence. I don’t know why I always resist, why I can’t just let it happen.

My mind doesn’t understand the supernatural capability of Jesus to save. Not to save me from Dante’s hell – but a hellish existence of my own making today and every day. Salvation is in real time, if I only let myself believe.

Corporate worship melts me like nothing else, but kneeling silently on the floor is also a great way to dethaw. De thawing can occur anywhere and anytime if I just ask and take the time. I need to feel the real presence of God every day, or I forget and doubt, and freeze. God melts me down, and I realize how dehydrated I was living— Spiritually dying of thirst next to a river.