I first heard about you when I was five. My sister told me of you in such a natural way. You made such sense that I couldn’t believe I had not already figured out the wonder and truth of your love. It seemed so right but I could not have found you without someone else telling me.

At the same time, the playgrounds of childhood were calling. There were four square, football games on the blacktop, imaginary games based on television. Fistfights with good friends—on the grass, never in the street. You were with me, but I can’t say that I was always with you. Life marched on. There were board games that I rarely won. I sold stuff, real or imagined, to people, real or imagined, to benefit myself or my Cub Scout pack or school or the Red Cross or UNICEF or some imaginary world-changing charity.

I didn’t exactly forget about you. But there were other things.

There was my seventh-grade best friend’s mother, who always had a rice cooker on when I would go over after school to shoot hoops. She never failed to offer us a sample of the evening meal. I remember lumpia, a food I had never tasted before, but tasted like food from home, a home that was mine, but one I had never lived in. Sometimes I stayed for the whole meal. This was the beginning of my interest in other people and cultures and foods that seemed unusual for a picky eater like me.

The rice from the cooker and the lumpia and me and the family I didn’t know well—and you were there, the other guest at that table.

Sometimes I played records on the stereo, a box version with a lid on which to play the 45s. Everything that poured out of those speakers seemed real and magical at the same time. I never wanted just the single 45. It seemed like a waste of money to get only one track when you could buy an LP and get so much more.

You were listening to the music with me back then..

And then I learned to play music myself, and it was the same thing—real and magical. Scales and drills, over and over, big bands and pit orchestras. To play the music I had once only listened to was revelation. Often, I thought that this music going into me and coming out of me was somehow truth flowing from you in a way that made me feel closer to heaven than hell.

Were you enjoying the music back then?

I was growing up. Things were getting hard. There were demonstrations. Teargas and gas lines. Teachers in my public school offered condolences when my grandfather died. Adults outside my family showed me they cared—which was a shock sometimes. When pretense was dropped in favor of care, a teacher became a multi-dimensional human, more than an authority, another human being. It was better to learn from them afterwards.

You watched me filing the music after school, looked after me when I ran sprints after class with Motown going through my mind. Band teacher. Track coach. You were there.

It wasn’t only people who helped me. Words became friends. In writing I found a path where I could know what I was thinking and feeling. Words helped me to try and make sense of what was going on in me and my friends, in the world, underneath me, all around me, words to sort things out. I rose to the top and sank to the bottom at the same time. Words became what people could not—ever present and able to tell me where I was. Friends along the way.

Those notebooks I selectively showed only a few pages to a friend here or there—you read them all.

I became aware of my own imprisonment, the sins and limitations that increasingly seemed to define me in ways that I didn’t understand. The world seemed slanted to make me want things that you would not want. Voices were saying that if I did a certain thing, you would bless me, belittling the truth that when I was not blessing you, you came.

Sometimes I ran to solitude with my beloved words, and I wrote. You saw all of them, surely. But they weren’t enough. These friends did not leave me, but they could not atone or transcend or forgive.

I lifted my eyes, realizing the insurmountable, inescapable place with little gods and distractions everywhere. Hell stood before me on that path I didn’t know.

No people or words could provide what I needed.

From where does help come when I am in this prison of fallen failure and falsehood?

There is only one answer.

When you came to me in prison, it was confusing at first. How could you be there alongside me. In this isolated place, a prison for the lost, where you for sure did not belong, you came.

The prison door opened. You told me to walk out. You had to tell me to walk out the door you had just opened otherwise I never would have walked out.

But you could—the Word could, the one Word, before and above all others. The spoken word-maker of heaven and earth came to my lone cell. There was blood and pain that I could not comprehend. You spared me that and yet it was there. Nothing is more immediate than the pain of broken flesh and blood. There we were. Creator and created being. You the Word and the person, lifting me, guiding me. At your table I never deserved a space, yet you pulled out the chair and bid me to sit. So, sit I did and do still.

How can you be so close, so now, so much more the teacher and friend, the balm I need right now.

When my foot was stuck in a crag, you freed me to walk. You set things right.

Living in the darkness of the sun and the lightness of the moon, I found rescue. You put things right.

When I had breakfast week after week with my friend after his mother died and before my father did, you were there with us.

You are the lifeguard that never sleeps, ever watching, day and night, the waters and tides we swim.

Always coming, going, these characters, words, tunes, going in and out so much of day and night. But in it you are always constant, the unwavering word that never flees, never forces, ever loves.

I am a fish you caught. You keep me. I’m a keeper. You never cast off. You are the keeper of everything. Artist. Singer. Chef. Lawyer. Savior. Companion. Doctor. Neighbor. Nurse. Patient. The one who builds the fire on the beach and invites me to come, eat.

From this time forth and forevermore.