My Lasting Minutes

More than thirty years have crossed our door,
and still you stand where vows were spoken for.
I’ve handed you a lifetime’s worth of reasons to leave—
enough to wound, enough to make you grieve.
I’ve watched my failures gather into weight,
like stones that press the balance of our fate.
The man I prayed that I would one day be
stands distant from the one you daily see.
You are the finest gift these hands have known,
the mercy I could never call my own.
If Heaven set one diamond in the clay,
it set your faithful heart upon my way.
Yet still I tremble with a single fear:
what if my shadow lengthens on your years?
What if I draw you, inch by quiet inch,
toward the darkness where I flinch?
So tell me plainly—tell me true and bare—
why do you stay? Why does your heart still dare?
Why bind yourself to one so prone to wrong,
whose weary soul has limped these miles along?
Do you not see what I have seen too well—
the guilt that stains where hope was once well?
The prayers that strike the sky and fall again,
unanswered, dying where they have been?
I sometimes think that God Himself has gone,
that somewhere I have crossed the line where dawn
no longer reaches mercy’s distant shore—
a name remembered, then remembered no more.
If He has left me, then be wise, my love.
Do not inherit what I’ve made of
the light that still remains. Take what is good
before my storms become your livelihood.
Yet every morning, there your footsteps sound—
no trumpet, no announcing star come down—
just quiet love that keeps its ancient vow
and answers what the world has long allowed.
You know the worst that lives inside of me.
Not rumor—truth you’ve had to hear and see:
the pride, the fear, the words that leave a scar,
the battles I have hidden from the dark.
Yet none of these have outweighed the vow we made.
Not because evil somehow lost its blade,
but because covenant is stronger still
than all the reasons I have given it to fail.
I think of One who washed the feet of men
who soon would break and scatter once again—
who broke His bread with lips that knew full well
one heart would sell Him, one would live to tell.
He did not call their failures small or light.
He named the darkness, faced it in plain sight.
Yet still He loved them toward the coming cross,
when every heart would count His life as loss.
Perhaps true love has always been the place
where justice walks with grace and does not turn its face—
not blind to sin, not deaf to every pain,
yet choosing hope again… and once again.
I have seen that mercy in your patient eyes.
Not because you swallow all my lies,
but because somewhere beneath the dust and stone
you still can see a man worth calling home.

Not finished.
Not repaired.
Not innocent.
But unfinished.

And then another thought begins to rise,
a quieter answer to my oldest cries:
Perhaps you stay because you see the father
our children know—not perfect, but a rather
steadfast man whose weathered hands still provide,
who walks life’s valleys, fails, yet will not hide.
If all I were was ledger, score, and debt,
there’d be no father for the sons we’ve met.
But love remembers something deeper still
than every failure tallying its bill.
The Shepherd left the ninety-nine behind
to find the one who crossed the warning line.
The father ran before his son could earn
the welcome he had shattered in his turn.
The thief, with dying breath and weight of shame,
heard paradise pronounced upon his name—
not because justice had been overthrown,
but because mercy claimed him as its own.
If God abandoned every heart that broke His own,
no garden tomb would echo with the stone
rolled back in victory. No risen Son
would prove that grace outruns what we have done.
Perhaps I’ve read His silence as neglect
when winter only hid what He still kept.
Perhaps the Potter’s hands have never ceased
to turn the vessel I had named released.
And maybe—maybe this is why you stay:
not for the man I am on any given day,
but for the man that love, in wisdom, sees—
the one still possible beneath debris.
You stay because love is not blindness.
It is sight that chooses mercy.
You stay because forgiveness is not haze
of forgetting, but the daily, fierce embrace
of waking and deciding once again
to keep what covenant has always been.
You stay because, beneath my fear and pride,
you still recognize the man God first designed—
the one He formed before the world began,
still visible to love’s discerning hand.
And if that is the reason you remain…
then perhaps that is the reason He does too.
Perhaps neither you nor He has yet resigned
to see me only as the sum of what I’ve been.
Perhaps you both still see the Carpenter’s intent—
hands patient with the wood, the plane, the dent—
still shaving what I only name as loss,
still believing in the making of the cross.
So now I ask no longer, “Why remain?”
Instead, through tears that fall like cleansing rain:
“Teach me how to become the man you see—
the one your staying always held as free.”
And if God’s hand has truly joined with yours,
then let these years that still remain be spent
to learn that grace was never meant to be
permission to remain the man I used to be—
but fuel to dare the long, slow work of change,
the daily resurrection, fresh and strange:
a broken man still rising to begin again.