Spike is Best

Where is your Nazareth, your backwater.
Turns out after several detours
you do not know, have not known.
You have not much been there.

Yet it's your most native place,
this nowhere where Jesus goes with his grace,
not to your high altar where you count your earnings
while living from some proxy,
and formally identify with one
beyond uncertainty and dispute.

This the joy.
Jesus got there in you long before you. He took up his abode.
To your backwater Nazareth that Jesus goes,
like a basket baby in the river reeds,
a God Child in the hay seed,

bypassing everything, first taking every finicky reroute.
He got way in behind of you.
Long before anyone.
Bethlehem, Egypt, Nazareth,
Jerusulem, Golgotha.

Something broken in you
that you yourself cannot even reach
because your fallen nature prohibits it.
Jesus bypasses this and enters
to rest secure.

You did not call him down.
You did not synchronize with him
by the right kinds of symbols.
Your repentance does not earn his grace
but is itself a fruit of grace.

You can store brooms in the confessional
if you wish, nothing wrong with that.
Can still have confessions there, colloquial.
A broom won't listen to your conversation
and come up with search recommendations
based upon key words in your litany of sins.

Some people speculate that the workshop,
kitchen and bedrooms
were basically one single place,

or if they were somewhat separate,
it wasn't by much; it was all one home.

Where Jesus rested, he worked.
Hidden in his development.
Your Nazareth, your backwater.