The sun goes to sleep yet the city still glows
The world knows that time is the greatest of foes.
We’ve drinks to extend it
Techniques that pretend it
Will bend as efficiency grows.
Yet urgency’s urge is what progress progresses
The harder we hustle, the more time compresses
What’s buying our best
Is robbing our rest
Entangled in unspoken yeses.
By sunrise, the city awakes to repeat it.
Today’s greatest threat: the time to complete it.
Has any the key
To set the world free?
Not one of us can defeat it.

But time is of death a parcel and part
For time is the pulse of mortality’s heart—
The clock keeps no score
If death is no more—
Our foe has been death from the start.
Our lives are as brief as the morning mist
The life we know well will soon cease to exist
When death is our rival
Bought time is survival
By hook and by crook we resist.
Yet the churn we create while resisting our fate
Just hastens the day we evaporate.
Has any the power
To crumble death’s tower?
They’d squelch our anxious state.

Now death stokes the flame but the fuel’s within
The source of our anguish is under the skin
Our pride drives our sweat
Our greed drives our fret
The foe in the hen house is sin.
How fickle this foe for it fears what it feeds
To death is where fully-grown sin always leads.
We’ve reaped from our fathers
And steeped in our waters
A silent but fatal disease.
Our flesh—though infirm—loves itself above neighbor
We run the world derby with backs to our maker
If anyone righteous
Could cure the soul’s blindness
We’d truly find rest from our labor.

There’s one more oppressor whose name disappears
Obscured by the chatter he spews in our ears
For as it’s been told
A foe from of old—
Humanity’s senior in years—
Has since the beginning been feeding us lies
And nursing the faith in our self-enterprise.
He has us convinced
That he doesn’t exist,
The vogue of the crowd is his guise.
If true, by what strength can a human withstand?
What trust can we place in our self-made hands?
Does any have might
To crush him outright?
The answers are etched in the sands.

Yet out from the desert—oh glory!—came One
Who clashed with the devil, endured, and won.

By self-sacrifice
He settled the price,
The shackles of sin are undone.

Now death, not a soul from His bosom can lift
And hist’ry itself has succumbed to a rift—

Christ’s resurrection—
The point of inflection
When time was rebirthed as a gift.

By grace there is rising a multitude whose
Trajectory bends with the pulsing good news!
The fight we were in
And never could win
Has become now a fight we can’t lose.

© Tanner Rinke 2022