Saturday, August 16, 2008

Coyote


10 April 2008, 21:32
The team of coyotes padded South off of the blacktop road and down into the wet grass of the ditch bottom.
Pausing, they glanced over their shoulders, through the drizzle and into the dark of where they came.
The wet shadows of the night covered them as they continued on their fog entrenched path. Leaving only silence and an image seared upon the mind and soul.

Every one has a path to tread through this life; mine was marked before I was born.

My father had a dream years before my birth. The dream was filled with dark and dread. From the dark, an image of a boy formed and was given the name Lamech. A second boy appeared from the gloom and was named Amalek. I am the second boy born to may father after that dream and am named Amalek

"The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation."

At an early age I found this scripture while sitting on a pew in the local Pentecostal cult that we were members of.
I knew about the dream and had the name so I took what was written to heart and wished I hadn't been born.

Amalek: Warlike; Dweller in the valley.

I was immersed in that religion for eighteen years. Spiritually I tried to reconcile my dark birth by repenting, speaking in tongues, praying, memorizing my bible, and separating myself from the things of this world. I tried to be "In the world, but not of the world." as the pastor said I should be.
But, I still never measured up to all of the 'saints' around me. I knew I could never be as close to God as all of the white haired elders who spoke in the tongues of angels.
After all, I was born to be rubbed out and never brought to mind again by the chosen people of God.
During these years my brothers and sisters fell around me. But, I survived, waiting for God to fall upon me with 'all, consuming fire.'

When my father was dying he recounted the dream and the dread that it was filled with. He was impressed with the accuracy of the dream; out of the dark, dread, and death that had stalked his family he had been given two sons that would continue. Two healthy sons who don't carry the mutated gene that killed his other children.

My father left this world and with him went many of the difficult life situations that had kept my heart and mind alive. The era of emergency, critical decisions, camaraderie, and adrenalin was over. My soul was empty; I was a cavernous well-shaft that had been propped and braced with rotting timbers and fissured stone. My heart was a vacuum and as it strained to pull the ceiling down I began to follow a dark trail of self destruction. I sought the occupation of a warrior. I chose to meet God on my terms.


It is insanity, but so often necessary to close the doors on so many memories; good and bad are sickly laced with an ache that radiates out of my skin. It is a fragmented life, a partial being, an incomplete person that needs to clip out, tear off, and utterly remove portions of his life to take further steps to continue a path in life.
I have robbed other people in my life by being so incomplete….
Who reached into my soul and hollowed me, who scraped the insides of me and left the cavernous well of empty…….
Did a God do this? "Ask anything of Me, I will give it….." What you want, I will give, I will make it so…..Ask anything of me, I will grant it….." "….. Guide my feet, take me, Guide my feet……"


I chose the hard ways, the tough and the bitter. I volunteered for the arduous, the dark, the wet, and the dirty. I pressed the veil that separates this world from the next.
I pressured that old God to meet me, but he pushed back and obscured my fields of fire.
I cursed him and sharpened my knives.
I authored my operation order and he let me run my reconnaissance behind enemy lines.
I prepared the field of battle and he sowed it with poppy's.
I was born again, hard. Hardened by my enemy.

I chose a path that in my mind was far different from the one I had been taught to walk, far removed from the way that I was raised.

I searched for destruction, but found healing.

My years as a soldier repaired my heart and mind. I educated and strengthened myself, I buried the parts of me that were dead, and I gained innumerable brothers in arms.

I have met my God and have accepted my name.
I have accepted who I am and what I was formed to be.

Looking over the years, I can see where I have been and I can see how seamlessly my path had been directed.
I have become what I was born to be; I am a living promise to a father, a human article of war, and I have walked in the valley, in the shadows of death.

My path continues. The waters are sweet, the grass is plentiful, and I fear no evil.




2 comments:

Staying Alive said...

I confesss I do not understand the darkness of the two boys. And I do not understand the difference of names. Are you going to fight the people of God? Help me understand what you are saying.

Michael

Terrence Maddox said...

My father believed the darkness that the two boys emerged from was a fortelling of the loss of his other children.

God fortold that he would have two sons that would survive.
My brother Lamech and I do not carry the gene that my father and our other siblings carried. We are his only children that reached the age of thirty.

Due to a few misguided religious "Leaders", I believed that my name meant that I was cursed and that God had no place for me.

In my youth I found it very difficult to endure what I did and I turned my anger towards God.
Unknowingly I was actually following and learning the path he made for me.

What I have ultimately realized is that my name is simply a description of the path that God made for me and a definition of the man he made me to be.

I have always been wired to be a soldier and have always been at and to war in some fashion. I have excelled in the arts of war.

I was born in Padanaram and that valley has inspired and formed my life more than I can adequately relate.

I have, for many years, wandered the depths of emotional valleys of pain and depression.

I have endured all of it by his divine hand. The path he planned before my birth has come full circle.

I am here as he made me, prepared by and for his work.

As for my brother Lamech (Poor;Made Low), he is on his path.
I believe he still suffers; he keeps to himself and I miss him.