Today’s blog will go along with yesterday’s challenge to Stay Awake! Maybe if we stay awake, we won’t fall into a hole. What?!

I think I’m late to the party on this one, but I just saw for the first time an apparently well-known poem by Portia Nelson. Portia was a singer, actress, and poet, well known for playing the nun in Sound of Music who said, “Reverend Mother, I have sinned” (when she removed the distributor cap from the Nazi’s car at the end of the movie).

Anyway, Portia wrote this poem in 1977, and I learned about it while reading Life is Messy by Matthew Kelly. (I quoted from Matthew Kelly’s book The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity back in June 2019.) In Life is Messy, he quotes Portia’s poem in the section A New Path, pages 86 – 89. Here’s the poem:

(If you can’t see the picture containing the poem, please scroll down. I have reproduced it at the end.)

Matthew Kelly writes:

It takes tremendous awareness and courage to embrace a new direction in our lives. It is so easy to sleepwalk through life. It is so easy to keep walking down the same street, so easy to keep falling into that same hole, and all too easy to adopt the posture of a victim and blame someone else.  – Life is Messy, page 89.

Not to “sleepwalk through life” is exactly what Jesus is calling us to do. To embrace a new path is also what Jesus is calling us to do. Saul of Tarsus is an example:

I persecuted [Jesus followers] even to foreign cities. In this connection I journeyed to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests. At midday, O king, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, that shone around me and those who journeyed with me. And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.” And I said, “Who are you, Lord?” And the Lord said, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But rise and stand upon your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.” Therefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. (Acts 26.11 – 19, ESV)

P.S. If you can’t read the poem in the picture above, here it is:

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters by Portia Nelson:

I
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in. I am lost … I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.

II
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

III
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. It’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault. I get out immediately.

IV
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

V
I walk down another street.