Jackie - "Give Me Time"

After posting below about the def poetry, I got to thinking about one of my favorite people in the whole wide world. Her name is Jackie and she's a senior this year from my former youth group in California. Here's a pic of her from when we visited Cali in January.

One time at Bay Hills Community Church we were doing a youth Sunday and I had been trying to pull the teens in to do music and scripture reading and such. Jackie is an extremely gifted poet. One of the things that makes her so great is that she's a lot like King David in her poetry. If she's angry about something, she doesn't express it by just saying she's angry, she's more like "death-to-the-infidels" angry. Anyway, I asked her to write a poem for youth Sunday about her faith. She said she would try. As it got closer and closer to the date, there was still no poem and I was getting nervous. She said she was really struggling because honestly she didn't know where she stood with her faith and didn't feel like she could write anything that the church wouldn't be offended by. I asked her to keep trying and write from her heart, but if she couldn't figure it out just bring one of her poems about friendship. Sunday morning came and I hadn't heard any poem from Jackie so I went to church assuming we were going to get a nice generic friendship poem. When she showed up, she handed me a piece of paper and said, "I wrote this late last night, but I don't know if it will work." I sat down and read it real fast and literally broke into tears. It was incredible. She read it at all of our services that morning and each time it was received with tears and applause. Jackie's awesome and here's her poem "Give Me Time".

Others act like I've committed a crime,

When sometimes I think that heaven's a lie.

Im sorry if I'm not as excited as most,

To bring into my life the heavenly ghost.

I don’t know why my mind works as it does,

Especially since it's as dark as it ever was.

I can't help it if I can't say,

That I believe we’ll all be in paradise one day.

Please don’t think of me as a bad person,

Because after all I'm only human.

So don’t judge me by my clothes or those kind of things,

My negative outlook or my piercings.

I've been left on my own more times then I can count

So dont be surprised if I'm always in doubt

Because I'm not that bad of a person inside,

Just a 15 year old girl with a lot to hide.