For 2019 I’ll be writing and curating my first poetry collection. I’ve gotten sidetracked for a few decades! Poetry is my first love in literature, and it’s time. Hoping to publish a collection of poems at the end of this year.

We all pray for people we love to be healed of illnesses. Even if you don’t consciously know you are praying. Please, please, we say in our hearts. The last couple years I’ve prayed for my mom’s eyesight to be restored. We all have it- this ache for things to be made right for every person.
Then this year I have been reading 1 and 2 Corinthians. And I came across a curious little verse that sparked a supposition in my imagination. Suppose Paul did stay the winter in Corinth…what divine appointment would his long winter stay have been for…?

The Knock
“Perhaps I will stay with you a while,
or even spend the winter.” 1 Corinthians 16:6

And suppose he does stay
Suppose Paul extends his visit to Corinth that winter
keeping his mat unrolled at a brother’s house
And suppose that mid-winter in Corinth a child in the village falls ill 
An eight year old girl, the daughter of a deacon in the church
The hot dry fever
the gray bed day after day
Bare branches outside pulse her bedroom wall  
Her father can see her drifting away
her skin thins and the bones protrude
She’s stopped taking water
“Go and fetch Paul” the father hurries his boy out the door
Across the dusty agora
down the path the boy runs
up to the house where the disciple has been staying this winter
The boy clamors to the door- raps twice hard
And suppose Paul is there inside and hears the knock
He’s nodded off while praying
down into the kind of sleep that scoops out the burdens of the mind and you wake up ready
Paul stands, wipes his face and tightens his robe around him 
He knows what the knock means 
“Who is it, boy? Who is sick?”
They hurry back together through the streets, straight into the house where the sick child lives
Paul moves toward the bed
His footfall softens, but his resolve compresses to a white-hot assurance
This is what the long winter in Corinth has been for
He reaches out his broad, warm hand
The hand that clung to a wooden board for three days stranded at sea The hand that shook free of the poisonous snake 
The hand that reached out toward the voice that called to him by name on a road so long ago
“Wake up, child” This hand touches her forehead
“The winter is over.  The spring has come.”