POEM: A king of infinite space...

Before Christ awakens our soul to a new life in him, we may be quite content with our lives. We feel as though we are kings of our circumstances, and we believe that we are free to live and do as we please. In truth, we are bound by the world, our flesh, and the evil one. Although we “rule” a space no bigger than a nutshell, we count ourselves a “king of infinite space.” This line (and the title of this sonnet) comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Hamlet states that, like us, he would be content to be king of a trouble-free kingdom, even if it’s as small as a nutshell.

Yet, thankfully, Christ doesn’t leave us to our false comforts and our delusions of kingship… he unravels a person’s life, shatters our crowns, and breaks our scepters. In her book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, Rosaria Butterfield calls her conversion to Christianity a “train-wreck”[1] as she describes how Christ dramatically upended her life, her career, and her relationships. The metaphor is apt—Christ literally breaks into our lives, shattering our old ways of doing things and our old ways of thinking about things. Although an incalculable blessing, being “born again” is as dramatic as physical birth. When we encounter God, we meet the true King of Infinite Space. This poem is meant to capture this conversion experience.

[1] Rosaria Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Pittsburgh: Crown & Covenant, 2012), 25.

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AUDIO READING
The poem, "A king of infinite space," read by the author.

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