Against the Artist’s Hand

(Thinking about the Bondi Beach Victims tonight…)

There are nights when cruelty chooses a doorway
and calls it courage.
When hatred sharpens itself into action
and dares to name the wound it makes as purpose.
This is one of those nights—
where the air itself feels bruised,
and silence learns a new weight.

Violence always arrives claiming power,
but it carries the stench of fear.
It borrows darkness because it has no light of its own,
and it reveals—without meaning to—
the poorest poverty of the human soul.
What kind of strength must hide behind fire and threats?
What kind of heart trembles so loudly
it must strike first?

And yet—this is what breaks me most—
the targets are never abstractions.
They are faces.
Names spoken softly at tables.
Candles lit with reverence.
Children learning what it means to belong.
Every life marked by the same divine fingerprint,
each one shaped with intention,
each one bearing the quiet dignity
of having been breathed into by God Himself.

To wound another human
is to insult the Artist who made them.
To terrorize a people
is to rebel against heaven’s design.
For no race, no nation, no faith community
was fashioned as an accident.
All were formed on purpose—
equal in worth,
accountable in love,
called to walk the earth as stewards, not destroyers.

Tonight my prayers do not rush.
They sit with the broken-hearted.
They linger beside trembling hands
and grieving homes.
They ask that comfort would arrive
not as noise, but as presence—
arms around shoulders,
light left on in dark rooms,
the steady assurance that hatred does not get the final word.

Because darkness, for all its bluster,
has always been temporary.
It cannot create.
It can only mar what already exists.
Light, however, persists.
It seeps through cracks.
It remembers names.
It outlives the violence that tried to erase it.

So let the lamps be lit again.
Not in defiance—but in faith.
Let love stand where fear demanded space.
Let justice be patient and sure.
And let us remember, with aching clarity,
that when one community bleeds,
the whole human family is wounded.

May the light outshine the darkness.
Not because we pretend the darkness is small—
but because God has never been.

If this poem stirred something in your heart, remember that the deepest roots grow from God’s Word itself. “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee” (Psalm 119:11). If you’d like simple, practical help in tucking Scripture into memory…

👉 Sign up for the free FAST Crash Course in Bible Memorization: http://fast.st/cc/21419