05/24/2026
Matt Moberg
I have grown tired of people speaking of God
as if God were a deed folded in their coat pocket,
creased and signed,
and they alone know where the porch steps give way.
I'm exhausted by those who speak of the Eternal
as one speaks of a summer house in Brainerd:
with directions to the back door,
an opinion about the drapes,
and the faint irritation that other people keep arriving.
I don't understand these folk,
the ones who carry God
the way men carry canes they do not need —
less for support than for pointing.
They tap Him against the floorboards of conversation.
They level Her at strangers.
They lift Them, now and then, to strike the air.
And always so sure.
That is the wearying part.
Not the speaking.
The sureness.
It's in me too,
and I am tired of the little judge
I become
when I'm afraid.
The gavel in the tongue.
The courthouse in the ribs.
The witness chair
where the heart was meant to sit.
Everybody wants the truth now,
but nobody wants it
to lay a hand on them.
That's probably why we can't talk.
Every conversation feels loaded before it breathes.
We come in carrying screenshots like evidence,
numbers like broken glass,
our anger pre-lit,
our mercy left charging in another room.
Curiosity hasn’t killed a cat in decades.
If there is a God, I wonder what that God does when watching us.
Laughs, maybe.
Cries, probably.
Keeps quiet, perhaps,
the way mothers do when children have mistaken shouting
for being grown.
We are such little catastrophes of longing.
We cry in grocery store parking lots
with melting ice cream in the back seat,
because someone we love
spoke in a tone
that found the basement of the body.
We reread text messages
like monks bending over ancient manuscripts,
searching for proof
that we have not been quietly removed
from the country of Good.
We forget the thing that mattered.
We lose the thing in our hand.
We ruin what we were begging for.
We hand fear the microphone
then blame love for the speech.
We walk around with our childhoods leaking
through our good shirts.
We ask to be held with our fists up.
We beg for bread
then bite the hand
because hunger made us proud.
We are one bad night away from texting,
Are you mad at me?
to someone who is only asleep.
Think of that.
Think of how close we are,
always,
to mistaking rest
for abandonment.
Think of how little it takes
to return us
to the locked door
from twenty years ago.
And still we speak
as though angels briefed us
in a side room.
Still we pontificate like God pulled us aside privately
to clarify the meaning of the universe over appetizers.
As if eternity were a parlor trick.
As if grace were a chandelier
we could describe
because once, briefly,
we stood beneath it.
As if heaven had a side entrance
and we alone knew the code.
How did we become so certain?
Who poured iron into the cup?
Who told the trembling hand it had failed?
Who taught us
to confuse volume with truth,
sharpness with holiness,
a closed fist for the keeping of fire?
Who told you you had to be right in order to be good?
We are only animals
with calendars and car insurance,
hurtling through black space on a burning stone,
arguing about pronouns and tax brackets
while our houseplants die because we forgot to water them.
And yet we insist that we have the Truth on matters like
heaven, bodies, sin, mercy,
justice, gender, eternity,
whether Apple is a buy or the Fed will blink,
and the curriculum
someone else’s heartbreak
was apparently assigned to teach them.
Selah.
Maybe the holiest thing is not loud certainty.
Maybe the holiest thing is the quiet softening.
The breath before the answer.
The hand unclenching.
The sentence that begins,
Tell me more.
Maybe God is not waiting
for us to win the debate.
Maybe God is waiting
for us to notice
the sparrow on the fence,
the soup on the stove,
the friend still answering,
the body still breathing,
the morning returning
with no guarantee
except its own golden arrival.
Maybe God is less interested in being defended
than in being encountered.
Less interested in our raised voices
than in our lowered guard.
Less interested in the flag we plant
than the shoes we remove.
So come.
Leave the argument still chewing on itself in the kitchen.
Leave the last word face down on the table.
Let someone else win the echo.
You do not have to answer
every bell your fear rings.
Come outside in this unsolved world.
There is still jasmine climbing the fence.
Still rain making music on the trash cans.
Still the neighbor’s dog
believing every morning
is Easter.
Come and see how
the sky is doing that impossible thing again
where it holds everything
and asks for nothing.
There is still a world
that has not learned
our hatred of being unfinished.
Come be unfinished here.
Come be unsure.
Come be the kind of small that finally fits inside mercy.
Come be human.
Come be quiet enough to hear the life beneath the life.
Come stand here
without an answer,
and let awe
do the work
that argument never could.
Let it soften
what certainty hardened.
Let it loosen
what fear clenched.
Let it make of you
not someone who knows more,
but someone who kneels better
inside the life we are already in.
"Selah"
36x36 Acrylic and Oil on Canvas
This piece is available to bid on here:
By Matt Moberg Art
