A story, a story!
(Let it go. Let it come.)
I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender into this world.
First came the crib with its glacial bars.
Then dolls and the devotion to their plastic mouths.
Then there was school, the little straight rows of chairs,
blotting my name over and over, but undersea all the time,
a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work.
Then there was life with its cruel houses
and people who seldom touched-though touch is all-but I grew,
like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew,
and then there were many strange apparitions,
the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison
and all of that, saws working through my heart,
but I grew, I grew,
and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,
still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked,
and I grew, I grew,
I wore rubies and bought tomatoes 
and now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say,
I am rowing, I am rowing though the oarlocks stick and are rusty
and the sea blinks and rolls like a worried eyeball,
but I am rowing, I am rowing, though the wind pushes me back
and I know that that island will not be perfect,
it will have the flaws of life, the absurdities of the dinner table,
but there will be a door and I will open it
and I will get rid of the rat inside me, the gnawing pestilential rat.
God will take it with his two hands and embrace it.

As the African says:
This is my tale which I have told,
if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,
take somewhere else and let some return to me.
This story ends with me still rowing.

Acts 17:22- 17:31

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”