locusts of misfortune

What locusts of misfortune
Have swarmed across this field,
Swarmed and swept and swallowed up
Ravaged, raged and recklessly kept
My heart's desires from glorious fruition.

Nothing to reap but woe here.
Nothing to keep or re-sow here.

Turn instead to a foreign soil
Thorny and willful, here to toil
In an honorable fiefdom, a selfless planting,
Scattering God's seed, a prayerful dismantling
Of hurt and doubt and misplaced longings.

Amidst the non-belief the grains fall,
And I, who have no harvest of my own,
Become a grateful tool in a needier land,
A seed myself, cast from a mightier hand.

Copyright 2003 by Mary Lou Cornish (Used with permission)

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Mary Lou Cornish writes from her home in Fergus, Ontario, Canada. Read her moving poem "Fierce Mercy," which won Honorable Mention in the 2005 Utmost Christian Poetry Contest. Above that poem is a short bio, which puts an informative light on all her poems.

(Mary Lou, I wish I could take away the pain. However, as Oswald Chambers says, "Over and over again, we become amateur providences, we come in and prevent God; and say -- 'This and that must not be.' Instead of proving friends of the Bridegroom, we put our sympathy in the way and the would will one day say -- 'That one was a thief, he stole my affections from Jesus, and I lost my vision of Him.'"

I would not be such a one. Instead I appreciate and am fortified by the wine, squeezed from these bitter grapes, though I admit I do not understand.)