Let Me Bless the Borrowed Ride
The Great Litany
C Train To the Temple
If God answered my recent complaint as he had that of Jeremiah
Let Me Bless
the Borrowed Ride
Lenten Devotional for 2025
Rejoice!, Hazel Dolby, © 2005 The Saint John’s Bible, Saint John’s University
in Maplewood, New Jersey.
Not Jerusalem.
Nowhere sacred, nothing holy.
Just curb and noise,
sidewalk salt,
a fast-food wrapper caught in the wind.
No donkey here.
Only cars—
honking, leaking, late.
And still I look.
Still I wonder—
if you came by,
would I know?
Not robed in gold,
not high and lifted up,
but low,
low like breath,
like mercy,
like dust.
Maybe you'd be riding a beat-up bike.
A rusted van.
A bus stalled on Springfield Avenue
with no heat and someone singing softly in the dark.
I picture you coming through the tall grass,
riding quiet—
no spectacle,
no threat.
Palms rustling like breath
against the side of a colt
that’s never known burden.
That detail stays with me—
never ridden, never broken.
Set apart.
Holy in being perfectly there, and then.
You move through the world like that:
barely noticed,
wholly unmissable.
Refusing empire’s parade,
you make protest look like peace.
And maybe this curb
is holy ground
after all.
Maybe you have always come this way—
through ordinary streets,
on the backs of borrowed things,
leaving grace in your quiet wake.
I am borrowing this time,
this breath,
this life.
Let me use it well.
Let me see the Word made flesh
through humble,
aware eyes.
Let me not miss you
because I was looking up.
Let me see you
riding low.
Let me bless the borrowed ride.
Let me live like I know
this life is on loan—
and the sacred
is already unfolding
under my feet.