Sabbath Prayer Part 4

Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles.  Fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing.  Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning illumines the darkness in which we walk.  Help us see, wherever we gaze that the bush burns, unconsumed.  And we, clay touched by God will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, How filled with awe is this place. Prayer from Jewish Sabbath Prayer Book 

So far we have sought to step into this prayer....let it settle and seep into our soul...sing to our hearts and speak to our lives.

Do you have a favorite word or turn of phrase so far as we've returned to it?

Have there been moments when you've glimpsed the grace of God, like a lightning bolt illumines the night sky?

Have there been moments you've sensed the sacred in the ordinary this past week?

This prayer connected with another beautiful set, series of words I recently ran across.  It is from a song by Cloud Cult, entitled: Through the Ages.  These are the words:

We were born on a lightning bolt, grew up in the ocean salt, 

We’ve traveled through ten thousand lives. 

So if ever I can’t see the magic around me, 

please take my hands off my eyes. 

I was prayerfully pondering that as I drove to church on Sunday.  There was the news of Charottesville, VA weighing heavy on my heart.  I considered all the divisions and differences in the world.  How in the world do you speak into a time such as this?  I was listening to this song, when I looked out the window and saw a beautiful, bold rainbow!  To be sure, it didn't solve everything.  People are grieving in VA...we struggle as a country to name bigotry and bias and refuse to confront white privilege for what it is....we deny the pain by consuming more and more.  Brene Brown says that we are the most addicted...overweight....medicated culture in all of history.  So, that makes you feel good, he wrote sarcastically.

You see, I don't need to see the world as either/or...it is both/and.  Pain and beauty...brokenness and blessedness...life and death...Christmas and Easter.  You can't divorce the two truths...like a teeter-totter they are both true.  Like the night sky with the gathering storm...and the lightning bolt that illumines us to see for a few seconds.  Both are true.  We don't have to choose.  We won't always be able to fully understand.

So, we pray that we will take our hands off our eyes to see the beauty, joy, hope...as well as the brokenness and pain around each of us.

I keep coming back to this prayer...to let it form a well worn rut in my soul until I can say the words from memory.  

I pray you are finding more than a trace of God's grace in these words as we continue to let them sing and speak to our hearts in these days.

Grace and peace ~~