The Long Walk to the Cross

The Long Walk to the Cross

The bell in the steeple rang a thousand times,
And a thousand times I adjusted my mask,
Trying to pay for my ghosts with my rhymes,
Taking on burdens I wasn’t meant to ask.
I spent a decade in the shadow of the stone,
Polishing the “broken” until it looked like “whole,”
Sitting in a crowd but feeling utterly alone,
With the dust of the sanctuary coating my soul.
The years were a desert, wide and deep,
Where I bartered for Mercy, I couldn’t afford.
I sowed the tears I was destined to reap,
While hiding my “mess” from the eyes of the Lord.
I thought the distance was a wall I had built,
A fortress of “failure” and “never quite there,”
A mountain of “almost” and “weighted with guilt,”
Too heavy for any one person to bear.
But the Light didn’t tire of the ticking of clocks,
It didn’t grow weary of my “not quite yet”;
It waited through seasons of bolts and of locks,
Through every “I can’t” and every “regret.”
And then, in a moment that spanned all those years,
The struggle just collapsed like a house in the sand;
The Church of my Effort dissolved into tears,
And I found myself held by a nail-scarred hand.
It wasn’t a climb to the top of the height,
It was a fall to the bottom, where Mercy began—
From the dark of the building, into the Light,
From the “work” of the girl to the “grace” of the Man. 

©️ Deborah Seale 2026