No idea

 You have no idea


You have no idea what it is to give your young life

To the service of the Lord in your teenage years 

When friends are busy tracing steps 

Across a college or an office floor. 


You’ve never asked and indeed why would you?

What it’s like to turn your back on life

When life has just begun and you have come 

To harvest the early fruits that freedom brings. 


Sunday afternoons not spent at football matches

But in tidy rooms where disinfectant

Mingles with the scent of weekend incense

And a stilly Sunday silence permeates. 


You haven’t faced the final questions

Time and again from earnest preachers

Who speak of hell that will consume us

If we fail to clear our conscience. 


Lives of serenity steeped in anxiety

Weeks of silence but the voices echo

In the nights, lonely and abandoned 

When our lives escape our grasp. 


Lives lived against the cliff of time

When eternity starts each sentence

When we hope that God or heaven 

Has inspired this solo journey. 


Is all of this a waste of time and youth?

Would we be better in the pub on Friday night?

This God that seems to come and go

Can prove elusive when we join the fight. 


It’s ups and downs of course 

There is no refuge when we leave the world 

It follows us and gives us joys and pains

We cannot leave our true selves hopefully. 


Saints and sad men be our companions

Some should leave and some should stay

One thing for sure, it takes some courage

To stay the course or call it a day. 


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