I have been up early, both fretful and hopeful, thinking about taxes, thinking about home renovation shows and real life fixer-uppers, working on some poetry submissions. Usually I'd be revising a sermon on Sunday morning, but I got that done last night, after an up and down day.
I was thinking of mid-life crises, how some of us buy convertibles and others buy run down houses to fix up. I had planned to work on a poem about Jesus having a mid-life crisis and buying a run down house to renovate--the idea came to me on Friday. But I worried that readers would reasonably point out that Jesus didn't exactly live until mid-life to be able to have a midlife crisis.
My Jesus in the World poems can demand a willing suspension of disbelief, since Jesus is doing activities that he didn't do in the Gospels: bowling, going to a holiday cookie swap, helping with hurricane clean up, and so on. But I worried that mention of a midlife crisis would disrupt that suspension of disbelief.
This morning, the solution came to me, and it's so obvious I hesitate to admit that it didn't come to me sooner. I can take out the reference to a mid-life crisis. Let the reader decide why Jesus is buying a run-down house to renovate.
There are so many wonderful ways this poem could go--it's so wonderful to have a glimmer of an idea that's closer to fully recognized than just a whisp and to have poem creation to look forward to in the week to come.
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