The Poems I Have For You: Reflections on Jeremiah 29:11

This is a work by Andrew Barker winner of the 2024 Morling Beuchner Writing Competition.

(1/3) A New Year’s Note

I wrote a note in January.

Dates. Plans. Expectations.

As if I could see the year ahead

And confine it to a page.

I couldn’t.

Projects were cancelled.

Piles of paper grew.

Friends left.

My word for the year was 'breathe’-

I’m laughing at that too.

The note went in the bin.

God wrote a note long before January.

But only when mine was waiting

for collection on the curb

did I put my trust in His.

And His plans never fail.

He changed my priorities

to seek first His kingdom

and love those who are lost.

So this coming year I will listen

to Him and not to me.

Even if I still write a note.

Andrew Barker

Buechner Writing Competition

In celebrating and recognising the written word, Morling College hosts an annual creative writing competition in conjunction with the Frederick Buechner Foundation. Usually opened during the mid year semester break, we invite students to compose and submit a piece of creative writing on any topic.  (Conditions apply). The top three entries receive prize money and the works made accessible on this site.  It is a beneficial opportunity to creatively express your experiences, reflections and explorations, or provide entertainment, through the power of the written word.

Frederick Buechner was an American writer and theologian whose works inspire readers to see the grace in their everyday lives. His works encompass multiple genres and has been the recipient of many awards one being the Pulitzer Prize.  

The writers who get my personal award, are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly and truly as they know how and then of telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding. We need the eyes of writers like that to see through. We need the blood of writers like that in our veins.  –Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner, ed George Connor (New York, Harper San Francisco, 1992), p. 191.