Translations (seeing and looking) or this may only make sense to me :-)

Early this morning just as the sun was rising
I heard a maiden singing
from the valley below
oh don't deceive me
oh never leave me
how could you use a poor maiden so

Things pop into my head and this just did..so here it is.It was song from a tv show when I was a kid. Bewitched. King Henry the 8th had his minstrel sing it to Samantha who had been transported to another land in a long ago time.

Gary was saying this morning that he didn't really understand the poem I read the other day. It was one by James K. Baxter..and he said I would need to go back over it and explain it to him.
I was thinking about this this morning as I drove for coffee with a dear friend (so so good) .
Gary had a date with his lovely Sis.
I was thinking about Modernity and the complexity of language and metaphor and how people keep writing things like Love in fresh and different ways and I was considering Loves simplicity and its complications.
I love Gaz and he me. It is a gift that we feel so grateful for every single day. Our relationship has been strengthened and refined beyond our expectations in the last three years. We are still us and bring ourselves to the relationship..but in amongst all the muddle and a word such as Death. We love.
From there I started thinking about some scripture and what it said about love and the passages so often read out at weddings. The love poems and psalms. And I was thinking about how it was done by people of old.
Someone earlier in the week had said to me ' you must feel so helpless'.  Now that was such a good question, as when she asked it I realized I didn't and said to her,  'No I have God. It doesnt lesson the pain of this grief or the heart break ( I now know why we are spongey bodied-otherwsie we would shatter like crystal at the right pitch) but there is something there that is substantial that holds me.

While having coffee and talking with my friend, I was telling her this (she did ask :-) ).
 I said "I need to find a better picture to explain it,  this is what I have so far, its (my faith/God) like a piece of paper,  no more like a flat board, that is laid on uneven ground to put a table on that makes its steady."

And again no lessoning of the pain of grief but I know I am held.

After coffee I decided to grab a quick bowl of soup at a shady place, before heading back.

I got up to go as I had finished my soup and then thought ' actually I don't have to go yet (Gaz was texting me when he was free) I will stay and read a little. I opened my bible and it opened up to Psalm 119.

I have a Student Bible and Philip Yancey writes throughout it.

I opened to a piece of writing by Philip with the title  "A LOVE POEM TO GODS LAW ...How could scripture inspire such poetry?"
He starts off talking about Shakespeare and his sonnets to his dark lady (26 in total). He talks about the exactness required to write these and says " how can such a raging storm be reflected in a small still pond?".  He concludes with..'The discipline of it gave the wild emotion a backbone'.
He compares this to the structure of  psalm 119 and calls it a love poem to Gods law or as he puts it Gods instructions for life.
He writes " the poet sees life full of uncertainties, of enemies, of pain. But God has given a reliable guide for living - the pavement underfoot after you have been stuck in mud. Gods law to the psalmist beckons towards freedom not slavery ' I run in the path of your commands for you have set my heart free'

This was one of those moments where God spoke and I was listening. An affirmation of what I was explaining to my friend and the pictures I had in my head. If I had got up from the table and not listened to the quiet instruction to sit down and read..it would have remained untranslated.