God's Song to Us

 

We are leaning in and listening to the powerful, profound prayerful poetry of the hymn, “I was there to hear your borning cry” this week.  We are opening our hearts to hear this as God singing these words over our life right now.

I want to hold close to your life today the first verse;

I was there to hear your borning cry,
I'll be there when you are old.
I rejoiced the day you were baptized,
to see your life unfold.
I was there when you were but a child,
with a faith to suit you well;
In a blaze of light you wandered off
to find where demons dwell.

I invited you yesterday to think about God singing this to you.  Who was God for you growing up?  Was God the old, white guy with the white flowing beard and a robe to match?  Was God seen as loving or vengeful?  Did God seem distant?  Were You encouraged to deepen your relationship with God?  Or was God not talked about at all in your home growing up?  I wonder if our image of God can become stagnant or stay stuck in sameness over the years, rather than (as this hymn suggests) God who grows and move.  Or put another way, God as the ground of being in which we can grow and move.  Both may be true.  Just as the earth’s soil is alive and constantly changing, so are we.  And if we are in the image of God, God need not stay stuck in one image or one word or one way of being throughout our lives.   

I am particularly taken by the next to last line, “In a blaze of light you wandered off.”  My children are no longer children.  They morphed, seemingly overnight in the blink of an eye, into young adults who are about to wander off to college.  They are about to fly away from the security of the nest my wife and I have surrounded them with.  To be sure, there were days (especially when they were two or three), high school graduation looked like an eternity away.  Even as people said, “Enjoy this now, it goes too quickly,” that can be hard to do when you are sleep deprived and working long hours at your job and trying to potty train!  Yet, I realize that the blaze of light when we wander off happens to all of us, not matter our age.  Perhaps the pandemic or witnessing the ways we discriminate or the stress and strain of life of this last year has caused you to feel like you’ve wandered off from God.  Maybe falling out of the rhythm of weekly worship or feeling confused has caused a riff between you and the divine.

Each of us lives in the mixture of past, present, and future.  Faith, I believe, is elastic and expansive and can embrace our understandings from when we were young to today. 

Finally, I invite you today, to think about a child you know.  This might be a grand or great-grand child, a nephew or niece, a neighbor’s child, or your own.  A child you know and send that child a text or a note telling him or her your love and support and care; tell a young person something you are proud about in him or her.  Our children are growing up in a world of a pandemic and polarization and problems that are vexing to us as adults.  Problems that will not be easily solved.  We need to cheer our children and youth and each other on in our daily living.  Come to think of it, trying to encourage everyone you encounter today to let his/her light shine might be the best prayer to live today.

Prayer: Holy One, embrace us with a grace we need and then empower us to let Your grace loose in our lives this day.  Amen.