"Donald Hall, the poet laureate of New Hampshire as well as a great baseball poet, went into his grandfather's attic and found many, many boxes, one of which was filled with short pieces of string. The box was marked in an old hand: STRING TOO SHORT TO BE SAVED. Hall was astonished. This box of string had caught him completely off-guard. And from his off-guardedness and un-guardedness, he was able to write a beautiful poem.
"The poem states the obvious: his grandfather had saved the string that was too short to be saved. If you have ever felt like you were a string too short to be saved, you know what it means to be risen.
"God has saved us all in a great attic. Nothing is ever lost to God. Nothing. Not a single dead Bosnian child. Not a single teenager who commits suicide. Not a single child hit by a car. Not a single young woman who dies of breast cancer. Not Mary Magdalene. Not Rodney King. Not one of the policemen who beat him. Not one is lost to God. We will each appear too short to be saved many, many times in our lives. And God will still save us.
"Risen is the experience of string that knows it is too short to be saved but is saved anyway. Despite itself. After Jesus was raised, he raised us. As he promised, he went before us into our Galilee."