I'm writing down a sixth point to conclude with here because I just thought of it. Let me give you three reasons why I chose William Cooper to talk about this year.

Number one, I have found since I was 17 years old, probably before, but my memory is not well before that, that poetry

has an unusual power in my life.

And I don't so much mean reading it as trying to write it.

And in reflecting on my own pilgrimage.

I went back in my files and I didn't know I had these,

but I found leaves have fought, 1964, senior in high school, the

Cordon, Wheaton College, 1965, I was a freshman, the opinion from Fuller Seminary, 1972, the Coevel from Bethel

when I was teaching there, and I have poems written in all of those books, and it just was a visual reminder to me that ever since I was a visual reminder to me that ever

since I was 17 trying to write poetry has had a very significant place in my life.

And there's a reason for this. I've reflected frequently on what happens when I spend the hours it takes to take a fairly simple

thought and put it into a new way of speaking.

And what I think it is, is this. I live, as probably you do to, with a perpetual

breach. breach between the intensity of my passions and the magnificence of the reality I see.

A chasm of inadequacy to say and feel what ought to be said and felt in view of that God, that heaven, that hell, that family, that world, that eternal life.

The realities out there have always seemed so magnificent

to me that what's in here has always felt inadequate. And poetry has been my lifelong effort to build a bridge across there, to find a way of speaking and really a way of seeing and feeling that attempts to bring just a little closer

together the passion within and the glory without.

And therefore I have been taken and the glory without.

And therefore I have been taken up with those who have expressed their faith in that way

and William Cooper tried to close that breach with poetry and some of you have.

There are other ways of closing it, trying to close it.

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