“Wings, Wind and Wine” – a poem with explanation

So I took Steve Witt to the airport yesterday morning.  Steve Witt is a pastor from Ohio that taught a week-long seminar at MorningStar University on finding your passions, living with them in mind and focusing your life on your personal aspirations in light of the Lord.  The very beginning of the week was a class where Steve Thompson, the director of the school, gave a teaching illustration using the movie “Dead Poets Society”.  That night we rented the movie and got stirred up for being poetic.  So since I was already up at 4:44am and was done being a chauffeur by 6am, I went to breakfast alone and wrote a poem.  This is the poem that I wrote:

The Center billows pump tirelessly
Endurance is their market and Egypt their competition
Though the ash-bird rises from where she was razed
Her cage does not open up for he was raised in shame
With holy sails up, patches and all
The Scarlet Thread holds strong
But the hides don’t rock the same tunes
And the strong drink never weakens
Ever stretching the limits of lovingkindness
Ever staggering are His friends
Ever sprinting are the intoxicated
While the sober play the wall of observation
Frowns for the sober, crowns for the drunk
“Tipsy kings,” the phoenix sings, “recover the hidden things.”

For those who do not think like I do and would like to understand this poem, I will explain it line-by-line.  Just a note, I’m not one who believes that art has as many interpretations as it has observers.  I know exactly what I meant when writing this, and though someone may find something else in it that strikes them, I did not mean that in my original intent.  So I guess it could mean that “for them”, but that is not what the poem means.  Anyhow, that is my personal rebellion against postmodern thinking.  On to the explanation.

Lines 1 and 2:
Steve Witt talks about the internal passions in our spirits from the Lord being the winds that blow the sails of the boat of our lives.  There are, however, other winds that blow.  Egypt is a symbol of the world in Scripture.  So the Center billows are the Source of our passions, the Lord, and the world is the competition.  He never stops blowing upon us from within us and His market, or His job is endurance – a job that the world cannot beat Him at.

Lines 3 and 4:
The ash-bird is a phoenix, a mythical bird that is a symbol of resurrection life and the spirit of a believer.  “Razed” in line 3 is not a typo, it means “from the place she died or was brought down”.  The phoenix will die and be burned up and then be resurrected from that same place.  But the cage is the skin that our resurrected spirits live in, our flesh.  And sometimes we don’t open up and let our spirits free because of shame that we grew up in.

Lines 5-7:
Our personalities are like the sails of the boat of our lives, according to Steve Witt (and I agree).  Though we have patches and things that the Lord has fixed in our personality, we are by nature “Holy”, not “holey” or “hole-filled”.  It is the Scarlet Thread of His Blood that holds our once tattered souls together.  However, the patches made of hide/skins/cloth do not always match the generation they are effecting.  Just like the wine and the wine skins must match in age and usage, so patches must be equally aged.  So the reference to “rock the same tunes” is an allusion to not listening to the same music just as my parents’ generation and my generation do not listen to the same music.

Line 8:
The “strong drink” is the new wine that requires a new wine skin.  It only gets more potent with time.

Lines 9-11:
The new wine is the Lord.  He told Israel that He is the one who “exercises lovingkindness” in Jeremiah 9.  When I lift weights, my goal is to stretch the limits of my muscles, when the Lord exercises lovingkindness, He is stretching its limits to show how far it will go.  In this same passage in Jeremiah, the Lord says that no one is to boast except in two things, that they know and understand Him.  It is those who are in true friendship with the Lord that are many times found “drunk in the Spirit” as Paul exhorted the Ephesian church to be.  They continue in their intoxicated state as they know Him more and more.  But they are not like worldly drunks, who stagger and get no where, they sprint after the Lord and His upward call on their lives.

Lines 12 and 13:
The most offended people at Jesus were not the ones who were morally in opposition to Him, but those who were religiously minded.  The Pharisees hated Jesus unto killing Him.  Today, we still have and are pharisees when we see what the Lord is doing and rather than jump in and enjoy, we sit back and watch.  Jesus said that the Kingdom does not come through observation, but this is what we religious people do, we “righteously judge” what is happening from an outside perspective, never getting our feet wet.  But in reality we are being help back by that same spirit the pharisees had from entering into the Joy of the Lord.  The reward of religion is a frown on your face, the reward of those who jump in with what the Spirit is doing is a crown on their heads.

Line 14:
Proverbs 25:2 says that it is the glory of kings to search out what the Lord has hidden for them in His glory.  It is the phoenix, a symbol of a resurrection spirit, who sings her song that those who walk in the Spirit (the “tipsy kings”) are truly walking in royal authority and will recover the things hidden for them by the Lord from ages past.  And they will enjoy those revelations for all eternity.

The One who has given You this authority (Luke 20:2)

The chief priests and scribes were not big Jesus fans. The Apostle Matthew and Peter’s disciple, Mark, record that Jesus knew that these religious leaders envied Him so much that they would accuse Him and condemn Him to death. In their defense, they were demonically inspired and compelled, but still their envy opened the door to that sort of influence. The chief priest, of course, did not want the Great High Priest of our confession to come into power, because that meant that they were out of a job. And though they did not know that He would tear the veil in two, the fallen angels that guided their thoughts and religious control of the nation knew. Demons hate all people, especially Jesus. So if they are able to control some and keep them from Him, they have accomplished their goal of making many people miserable with them for eternity. The scribes would also be out their jobs if everyone had equal access to the Spirit of revelation. Jesus sets people free to access God, this eliminates elitism across the board.

Just as the Lord doesn’t ask questions to get answers from us, the chief priests and scribes were not asking from Whom Jesus got his authority, they did not care. Their hearts were so filled with jealousy and envy that the people were following this carpenter-rabbi that they were asking “who gave You this authority?” Though masking it as a legitimate question, their masquerade is stifled when He calls them on their need for approval from men with a riddle-type counter-question that leaves them answerless.

It is this same envy and jealousy that comes up in our hearts when someone is promoted when we think we are entitled to what they are being given. It is jealousy of the anointing. Let me be clear here, envy of the anointing leads us down the path of the spirit of murder. Follow the logical progression. When you envy someone, you begin to dislike and judge them, leading to anger toward them. This anger, if not dealt with in a healthy manor, becomes hate and that is the emotion of murder. Jesus set the standard high, saying that if we hate our brother in our heart, we have already murdered them. Envy is the entry point to the spirit of murder that caused the Pharisees to murder the Messiah. So when we begin to envy someone for their promotion or anointing, we are taking a stole down the same street. We must avoid this at all costs to walk in fullness.

One of my spiritual big brothers counseled me once to pray for all of my ministry friends to be more anointed than myself. I had come asking him for help in how to walk in humility and not self-promotion. So I began to do that, I put a list of all their names by my bed, 6 pages or so, and would periodically pray for each by name, one page at a time. This was fine, I found, until it actually began to manifest in real life. All around me those I was once so supportive of became the subject of my envy, steadily creeping toward hate. I had to realize that I was setting my heart toward murder of the anointing, if not the anointed, by embracing this envy. I was becoming a Pharisee. It scared me badly.

In the end, I repented and found that I had a significant role in helping those around me to get out of the same religious mindsets as well as support those that were the former targets of envy. The great part about having these things come to the surface of our souls is that they are coming up and out, like dross in the purifying fire. Demons always manifested most harshly when Jesus came near to remove them. When we start to manifest wrong thought patterns and heart issues that are not normal to our personality, it is because Jesus is near and coming to deliver us. Take heart, He is near and He loves us.

*Anointed One, Giver of the anointing, deliver and preserve us from envy. Amen*