While all of my children enjoy writing in various capacities, our missionary daughter and I are the family poets. Kayla’s poetry is so poignant, so moving. I love to soak it in.
Today we left Kayla in Springfield, Missouri to begin her missionary appointment with the Assemblies of God Health Missions as a health educator. She will literally be all over the world during the next two years helping existing missions, churches, and clinics reach those with HIV and AIDS with the good news of Jesus Christ.
Today I would like to share a poem that she recently included in her missionary newsletter. She wrote it when she was a young teen—but it speaks her life’s heart so well, even after nearly ten years. She still, and has always, desired to be found in the raging sea of love rather than the quiet, easy stream of the world. May we all be found in God’s Raging Sea of Love as we seek not the easy way of parenting, not the paths that are simple, but the ones that take us and our children exactly where God wants us to go.
"Raging Sea of Love"
by Kayla m. Reish
We asked for your love to come in like a raging sea,
But what we wanted was a quiet mountain stream.
One that we could build our sandcastles beside,
With all the world’s decorations, pillars and beams,
With the water flowing gently--- not too deep or wide,
Just close enough to hear the water trickling down,
And far enough from the coast high up on mountain ground,
To fool ourselves into thinking it’s the ocean’s roar.
We listen with rapt attention to the seamen’s lore,
Thinking we know what the great captains know of.
What they mean when they talk about the waves they felt,
As their eyes looked at the endless water of God’s love,
Which caused their flesh to die and their hearts to melt.
We congratulate each other; stepping in the stream,
Never daring to go too far from the shore to dream,
And play the great sea travelers’ adventures.
In the small puddles we call huge tide pools,
And through the tiny ripples we call great billows,
We carefully form our paper boats and call them ships.
Like the scars of the ocean travelers we know,
Great wounds are earned when into the water we slip.
Quickly we dry the water of love off our arms,
Before it hits our flesh and can cause it any harm,
What brave seamen we are in our little waveless creek.
At the games we play in our quiet mountain stream,
The great sea captains can only shake their heads and mourn.
Because they have seen the raging sea of love,
And to spend their lives traveling it they have sworn.
No games, no ease, no earthly rest to speak of.
Just them and the water for miles and miles.
The surf of surrender forming watery piles,
And crushing down on them time and time again.
Out in the limitless depths of the raging sea,
They’ve heard the sounds that love alone knows how to make,
When its flood comes on them leaving no where to hide.
Every inch of them it crushes onto it breaks,
And cuts deep wounds into their flesh and bruises their pride.
No rescue from the fury of love’s embrace.
Then they struggle to their knees and look into love’s face,
Knowing they will never go back to the quiet mountain stream.
We cannot imagine the force of such a love,
Yet they dare to tell the stories of all they have seen,
Of a force that left them with nothing but brokenness,
Like we will never know by our quiet mountain stream,
And left them ruined for a life of worldliness,
Totally empty yet now completely full,
Addicted forever to the unstoppable pull,
Of passionate healing in God’s raging sea of love.
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