Elaine Christensen Quotes on God (4 Quotes)

DRY LAND All around me your death like some great ocean rages, wave after crashing wave till the cliffs of my arms give way to defenseless shore and I lie blackened against the sand. My hair streams like weeds about my head and pulls me, as surely as the moon pulls her tides, to the depths of earth. In darkness, I am swallowed. In darkness, I remember Jonah... that God prepared for him a black fish and after three days and three nights dear God, dry land appeared.

Inside me there is a dancer. Inside this middle-aged body of a housewife there is a dancer. Don't laugh. I have danced with sunflowers in sandy September fields with fruit trees each spring, blossoms in my hair at the lake's edge in winter where tall grass and thin reeds wobble on pointed toes in the wind and in summer with the sea where anyone can find the dancer inside. Don't laugh. Barefoot, arms outstretched, palms raised to the sky, to the birds, to the clouds, to God, who choreographed it all, I danced. I knew every step and the waves stood up and bowed.

EDEN We had no childhood, Eve and I. Eden was our mother's breast. Our lullaby was earth's first whimperings as grass and herb bloomed seasonless. I named them blade, by stem, by stalk in loneliness, before the Gods formed woman from my rib of dust. The g.

Covenant Water runs from a spout below my open window. A February sun thaws what's left of Thursday's storm. It is a day of whites and blues a squint-eyed day, a hold-still, breathe-deep day. When God made the world and put Adam and Eve in the garden of greens and orchids and grapes, part of Him longed for the day when they would discover winter. When it snows in the South, parents wake their children, even at three in the morning to see flakes like goose feathers, to feel them tingling on their eyelids. Children can't begin to understand what is given them, what it costs, that the cost doesn't matter. Dear God, don't let me take this day for granted. White edges every fence. Each roof is an untouched field. The honey locust offers clumps of snow like winter fruit left unpicked in its limbs. The ponderosa spreads voluminous petticoats out to dry. Light refracts, splinters across the snow like sequins scattered and hand-sewn on my daughter's wedding veil. It is a day for making vows, the kind you tell no one, the kind you keep.