O Creator of existence,
You set forth beginnings all around us; green sprouts rising, sunrises proclaimed by the first bird,
new life, sons and daughters, self discoveries, empowered joy. You inch things toward us like the
opening of morning eyes. You awaken us like a bolt out of the blue.
Because you so love this world.
Open our eyes to see.
O Sparkling Presence in the inky dark of midnight
When questions feel dangerous, you are with us to explain. Your whole world offers metaphor to
understand, our very bodies offer stories to tell a greater story. You are with us when we are more
puzzled than we started, and you are with us when the understanding dawns within.
Because you so love this world
Open our hearts to know.
O Lover of our Souls
How vast each speck of dirt, each blaze of comets tails, each pregnant moment, each reach to be
saved. How vast is the Us of us. How vast and beautiful this oneness of us all, us humans, if we
could just live it. We might all be saved.
Turn us to one another to be redeemed, freed from the past, contrite for deep hurt caused.
Turn us to one another, knowing every person we see is seeking to be loved, forgiven, changed
for the good.
We long for a perfection that might never come.
Perfection of health and healing.
Perfection of love and relationships.
Perfection of confession and forgiveness.
We long for you, because you so love this world and all that is in it. Your love is all that is
perfect in our unfolding and evolving human experience.
Turn us to one another in the moments of illness, treatments, and realizations that life is not
going to go on, even as new life in its many forms is just beginning. O how we need your sacred
love to get through it all. Help us to live right now, seek the good of others right now.
Even this prayer, O God, belies a habitual belief that you are out there, beyond our here and now,
and we must petition you to enter in, to come to us, to reach toward us.
Yet, you love this world so much, and are right here beside, within, around, above, below us;
Holding us
Encouraging us
Knowing us
Living through us.
This world is already within you.
May we have the courage to stop reaching outward, and instead, embrace one another,
as if we are your love,
For this world
For one another.
In the name of Emmanuel, Amen.