God's poem still being written
This essay is the theological companion to the Session 5 work on Faith Foundation. It centers on a single Greek word from Ephesians 2:10 — poiema — and explores what it has meant across two thousand years of Christian reflection. If the poiema teaching during the session stirred something, this is where it goes deeper.
Ephesians 2:10 is one of the most quoted verses in the New Testament. Most English translations render it something like this:
"Handiwork" or "workmanship" — that's the standard translation. It's a fine English word, but it conceals something. The Greek word Paul actually wrote was poiema. And it carries weight that "handiwork" can't quite hold.
The word appears only twice in the entire New Testament. The other usage is in Romans 1:20, where Paul says God's invisible attributes can be seen in the things that have been made — the created world itself, also called poiema. So Paul reaches for this word twice, and only twice: once for the cosmos, and once for us. Both are God's poems.
And yes — our English word "poem" comes directly from poiema. Same root. Same meaning. When Paul calls us God's poiema, he is saying — quite literally — that we are God's poems.
Why translate poiema as "handiwork" rather than "poem"? Translators have reasons. "Handiwork" is more recognizable. It avoids the connotation that humans are merely literary objects, when in fact we are persons with agency, will, and choice. "Workmanship" emphasizes craft and intention.
All true. But something is lost. Three things, actually.
First, a poem is not finished at the first draft. A poem is reread. It is revised. It finds new meaning in different seasons of a reader's life. A line that meant one thing at twenty means something entirely different at sixty-five. The poem itself hasn't changed — but the reader has, and the meaning unfolds with him. To call yourself handiwork implies a completed object. To call yourself poem implies an unfolding meaning still being read.
Second, a poem is meant to be heard. Ancient poems were not silent objects on a page. They were spoken, sung, performed. They existed in their reading. A poem that is never read is barely a poem at all. To be God's poiema is to be made for encounter — read by Him, by yourself, by those who know you.
Third, a poem cannot be reduced. You can summarize an instruction manual. You cannot summarize a Robert Frost poem and have anything left of it. A poem is what it is in its specifics, in its rhythm, in its line breaks, in what it doesn't say. The handiwork of an artisan can sometimes be replicated; a poem cannot. To be God's poiema is to be irreducibly particular. There has never been another you. There never will be.
The Greek word poiema didn't escape notice in the church's history. John Calvin, commenting on Ephesians 2:10 in 1548, wrote that the word means God's people are "a more excellent kind of workmanship" than mere creation — that we are crafted with the deliberate care a poet gives to language. Martin Luther, in his Ephesians lectures, drew the line directly to grace: poiema meant we were made, not self-made; received, not earned.
The medieval contemplatives went further. Hugh of Saint Victor, writing in the twelfth century, called the human person "a poem written by God's finger," drawing on Exodus 31:18 (the tablets written by God's finger) and the Psalms (Psalm 139:13: "You knit me together in my mother's womb"). For Hugh, the human life was scripture's third book — the world being the first, the Bible being the second, and the human soul being the third — each one God's poiema, each one to be read with reverence.
"Each of us is a poem written by God's finger, and our task is to learn to read what He has written."
Now bring all of this into your second half.
Many men arrive at retirement convinced that the meaningful chapter of their life is over. They were the protagonist; now they are the retiree. They built the structure; now the structure carries on without them. They were a verb; now they feel like a noun. The implicit theology — usually unstated — is that they were God's project, and the project is now complete.
Poiema contradicts this almost violently.
If you are God's poem rather than His project, then you are not finished. You were never finished. A poem doesn't finish — it deepens. The same lines you have been living for sixty-five years are now being read by you in a different season, and they mean something they didn't mean before. The caring shift you noticed in Session 5? That is a line being reread. The faith you find resting in unexpected places? That is meaning emerging. The strange peace about questions you used to need answered? That is the poem doing what poems do.
Read aloud something you wrote in your twenties — a journal entry, a letter, a school paper, anything. Read it slowly. You will discover you are not the same reader who wrote it. The text hasn't changed. You have.
That is what God experiences, in some sense, every time He reads you. Not because He didn't know what He wrote — but because the poem is still unfolding into its meaning. And He, more than anyone, knows how it ends.
If you take seriously the theological claim that you are God's poiema, three things follow for the Harvest Charter you are writing this season.
This is humbling and freeing in equal measure. Your Charter is not a self-authored declaration of who you intend to become. It is closer to a careful reading of what God has already been writing in you — and a faithful response to where the poem seems to be headed. The mood is discernment, not invention. As Frederick Buechner put it: "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." You don't manufacture that meeting. You discover it.
Just as a poem yields different meaning in different seasons, your Charter will be read differently five years from now than it is read today. This is why Tier 3 of the Charter framework treats the document as a living document rather than a finished statement. The man who writes his Charter at 65 and then files it away in a drawer is treating it as handiwork. The man who returns to it annually, allowing it to be reread by the man he is becoming, is treating it as poiema. The second posture is closer to Paul's meaning.
The full text of Ephesians 2:10 says we were created "for good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." The good works are not invented — they are prepared. Your task in writing your Charter is not to design what your second half should accomplish from a blank page. It is to discern what has already been prepared and to step into it. As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity: "There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal." Each life — yours included — is a poiema with its own particular vocation, prepared in advance.
The medieval church had a tradition of treating significant texts as illuminated manuscripts — works in which the words themselves were rendered with such care that the visual experience and the textual meaning became inseparable. The Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Très Riches Heures. Each letter calligraphed. Each margin filled with gold leaf and color. Each page taking weeks of devoted attention.
The medievals believed God was such a craftsman. That every human life was an illuminated manuscript in His hands — written, decorated, layered, beloved. Each life singular. Each life meaningful. Each life read by its Author with the patient attention a master artist gives his greatest work.
You are that. Not because of what you have accomplished. Not because of who you have become. Simply because of what you are. Paul's letter to a small church in Ephesus two thousand years ago names it clearly:
"For we are His poiema, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."
Write your Charter knowing this. The poem is still being written. The meaning is still emerging. The good works are already prepared. Your job — the only job, really — is to listen for what He is composing, and to walk faithfully into the next line.