Editor’s Note: This is the 2025 Writing Competition Grand Prize Winner in the Poetry category.
I. Theatre
I am a fourteen-year-old girl whose calling to shepherding
Is referred to as a slippery slope to liberal, anti-Christian evil.
Equal in value, distinct in roles to play.
Men and women are turned into actors and actresses
Up on an institutional stage.
We put on our stage makeup, covering up greed and abuse.
We memorize our lines, repeating unapplied Sunday school answers.
We go through empty motions and gestures,
Faces grim masks hiding our fear.
We glorify our prejudices
And dress them up as truth.
We become our costumes.
II. Choir
Listen to the voice of my sister.
Open your ears and make yourself hear.
Her singing is the waves of the ocean
Crashing as they reach rolling notes.
The tones pirouette and echo
They are dark, rich vibrato.
Listen to the voice of my brother.
Open your ears and make yourself hear.
His singing is the sound of the mountain lightning
Churning to a low, reverberating G,
The last cadences rumble and leap,
They are gentle, low elegies.
Listen to the voice coming from your lungs.
Open your ears and make yourself hear.
Your singing is the sound of potential energy,
Waiting for the right beat to chime in,
Your silence is a pause in rhythm,
It is the sound of a searching soul.
Your thirsting soul is given drops of waters
Equal in God’s eyes.
Infused with salt and dehydration
Distinct in roles to play.
You remain unsatisfied.
What you are searching for will not be found in a power struggle.
It will not be found in greed,
Not in fear, nor in blindness,
Not in checking off your I’m going to Heaven list,
Leaving youth group feeling
Angry, empty, empty.
What you are searching for will be found in Jesus, and him alone.
Ziggurats and power structures do not hold up his throne,
For his voice
Is not a declaration of bondage,
But a free, leaping
C aiaphas
H uldah
O nesimus
Rahab
D eborah
Of love.
III. The Painting
There’s a painting displayed in the art museum down your street.
You’ve been told it is an atrocity. You’ve heard many say
You should keep your mind away
From woke agendas.
Equal in God’s eyes, distinct in roles to play.
That painting’s not biblical, and that’s just the way
God made right and wrong.
If I could, I’d bring you here.
Before us is the painting we’ve heard called demonic
And it rests, shines in our eyes.
Billions of faces and bodies and colors,
Contrasting eyes, genes from different fathers and mothers,
Our races and ethnicities uniting us now, though they once were used to divide.
The painting smells like a church potluck,
It sounds like city band concerts in July.
It looks like Phoebe and Priscilla rewriting history,
Like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks lifting their eyes to Christ.
We are the painting.
I feel like I’m laying in the sun,
In an infinite amount of color and light.
People for miles,
All of the brothers and sisters I never met,
All these faces look like me,
Not because of the clothes their bodies wear or the jobs they have,
Not because of the roles society puts them in or the labels they’ve been given.
They look like me because there is unity in the colors and diversity.
The image of God rests not in an indoctrinated patriarchy, but in people.
“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine,
You did for me.”
He is in the old man playing guitar outside of Bath Abbey,
Sad tunes filling the misty, cold air.
He is in the tired woman who is always working at Raising Cane’s,
Getting everyone else what they need but not herself.
He is in the girl I knew who laughed with me in PE,
Whose name was turned into a joke by my peers and called “retarded.”
He is in the painting,
In all of the people He loves and made so perfectly.
I imagine this is why God clapped his hands in excitement, grinning
When his paintbrush made the first stroke.
There is perspective and light in every motion and color, in humanity.
The painting is very good.
And it doesn’t take a PhD from a famous seminary to see that.
If every person on earth could stand right here,
They too would see past the foreground,
Into this breathing, speaking masterpiece
Of human beings living in harmony, without structural inequality or labels,
Without hate or fear or misconceptions.
Each of the abused, of the oppressed, of the hurt,
Will one day rise and fly
Into the painting
To a sea of open arms and open eyes.
Photo by Kyle Head on Unsplash.
Related Resources
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How Planting a Church Made Me Reconsider My Beliefs about Gender Roles
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