EN ROUTE TO CANAAN/JERICHO—Katy Bowser Hutson

"Body, soul, listen up: This is the same damned deal as before."

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Katy Bowser Hutson is a writer and songwriter. She is the author of Now I Lay Me Down to Fight (IVP) and the coauthor of Little Prayers for Ordinary Day (IVP Kids). She’s also a contributing to projects like It Was Good: Making Music to the Glory of God and Wild Things and Castles in the Sky (Square Halo Press).

Katy is a creator/member of the children's band Rain for Roots. She is co-creator of kid’s jazz outfit Coal Train Railroad. She’s also a founding member of Rain for Roots. Katy and her husband, musician and producer Kenny Hutson, have also created a musical project or two along the way, as well as contributing to various and sundry other musical endeavors. Because it’s Nashville. Katy also speaks at conferences and event and consults on endeavors in faith and art.

She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband Kenny, their two children, and some chickens, where she has built a rather wonky but serviceable labyrinth in her backyard and hosts many deer and fireflies.

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EN ROUTE TO CANAAN/JERICHO

by Katy Bowser Hutson

Cancer and its accompanying stats 
Can lead a person into the foolish wrestling match
Of a negotiation with God. 
If I beat the thirty-three percent odds of dying
in the next three years,  
Can I stick around to finish teaching my children?
How about writing my book?  
How about to travel with Kenny? 
Can I forgo my “high chance of recurrence” 
And be there when my community needs me to speak bravely
Or create sacrificially? 
Or hold my daughter’s hand? 

Body, soul, listen up: 
This is the same damned deal as before.  
You’ve always had a death sentence. 
You’ve always had the same odds.  
You didn’t know what they were, 
But now someone has given you some vague lottery ticket
pulled from a front car tire, 
Pulpy and pitted. 
But, for all you know, 
you could still get hit by a drunk driver,  
Struck by lightning 
Fall dead of an aneurysm
Your cells could still go singingly along in symphony
til one hundred  
and ten 
Blissfully barely blinking through benign decades, 
Blessedly bearing burdens you have enough for at every turn. 
Which will embolden your prose,  
Which will sharpen your sight,  
Which will add pique to your poems, 
Which will add intensity to your touch,  
Kindness, forthrightness to your mouth,  
Empathy to your eyes? 
Which will draw love out of you? 

Apparently: this poisonous path.  
Bare me, bear me, Lord. 
Pie Jesu, parry with this pilgrim 
I hereby give up this particular thumb-wrestle
I am laid on my back 
It was never any different since you took me in hand:
Every hair on my head, every hair broken off. 
I have always malfunctioned in a malignant mire
And you have always raised me, wiped me, breathed in me, 
Strapped me on the back of a donkey and taken me to the 
Four Seasons  
With medical miracle makers for my wounds.
You stuffed a million bucks in my pocket  
And said you’d come back for me in a bit:  
Order the room service.

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Taken from Now I Lay Me Down to Fight by Katy Bowser Hutson. Copyright (c) 2023 by Katherine Jane Hutson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com 

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Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash