Morning Prayer

Sometimes I don’t know very well who or where God is.  Sometimes I spend too much time and energy trying to figure him out. When I’m doing that it makes it hard to pray. Praying doesn’t work when you’re wondering too much about God, using your mind to try to unwrap him.

And then what I need is to stop wondering and be lost in wonder.  I’m learning that praying prayers that others have written can help me with that. Then I don’t have to think up prayers, I can just pray them, I can offer them to my Father.  This spring and summer I’ve been using the book The Divine Hours by Phyllis Tickle. It has prayers (many of them Psalms) for four times each day.  I won’t pretend I’ve been praying them more than once a day, but it’s been a good start for me.

This morning the first phrase that caught my imagination was “He rides in the heavens, the ancient heavens.” And I imagined the being of goodness and strength riding in an Oklahoma thunderstorm. I pictured him encompassing our moon and sun and stars and the stars beyond stars forever. And I felt, just a little, the wonder of his greatness. Then in the very next prayer there was the line “May God be merciful to us and bless us, show us the light of his countenance and come to us.”  And I was amazed and humbled as I let the weight of that wonder sit in my heart a little.  I just asked the God of the stars to show me the light on his face.

And there I will let myself live today.  Fed with his life, the God of amazing bigness and perfect closeness.

1 Comment

  1. Love this thought, B!

    Sometimes we can complicate things by trying to think up a wonderful prayer or by trying to figure everything out. But really, it all comes down to being with Him and trusting Him, even if we don’t understand Him.

    Thanks for the reminder. I can totally relate. Love you!

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