Where To Find Christian Poetry

I was browsing in the poetry section of Barnes & Noble one day and I thought, “Wouldn’t be just so nice to find a good book of Christian poetry.” And then as I was driving away it came to mind, “Wait a sec, there are books FULL of the most amazing Christian poetry ever.” You can find them in a lot of churches all over the world – tattered and worn books sitting in the back of pews – and even though most of these poems were written without music, there were other men and women who wrote music for the poems and they have been sung for hundreds of years. I would like very much to write a poem one day and eventually have it be called a hymn. Sometimes I feel like it can be such an underappreciated thing to write poems as a Christian and that the pinnacle of Christian poetry would be to have a well-known blog where I post my poems and people post comments raving about how amazing they are. Now I’m starting to think that pinnacle of Christian poetry would be to write a poem that is sung and brings comfort and conviction to believers long after I am laid in the grave. You don’t have to be able to write music to write a hymn and perhaps the quality of the words and the mixing of truth and beauty will increase in our songs when the poets in churches begin focusing their gifting on writing hymns rather than the some less poetically-gifted musicians trying to come up with words for the awesome melody they just came up with. I think it’s pretty cool to think about. I’m pasting a verse from a poem-become-hymn below. It’s neat to think that this guy was sitting one day on his porch or his study – and perhaps it was raining like it is now – and he took out his pen and started writing. Now a hundred years later we are signing on to The City and reading his words. And perhaps some of us will be sitting on our porch one day with a pen and begin writing just like he did.

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.

Frederick M. Lehman, 1917