Our Moving God | A Prayer

You are Lord over every lord we know,

And King over every king we can name.

You surpass all the powers familiar to us,

And loom in unexpected majesty.

We find You uncomfortably mysterious.

God of the heavens unseen

God of the endless black mass beyond our sky

God of the systems, labeled and studied, but silent with power.

God of the seas uncharted, undiscovered, unplunged.

We would prefer You be predictable,

Stable and sedentary.

We would like to mark You on our charts and note the order of Your activity.

But instead we find You roaming,

Surprising our most educated assumptions.

We find You in places we did not leave You,

And it unsettles our piety.

We cannot wrap our minds around You,

Nonetheless our hands.

We cannot pin You down in Your puzzling way of being

So unlike ourselves.

And then You came.

In our likeness, in our flesh.

To enflesh the evasive power of the sky

in our time and our space and our language and our manner.

So we wrapped our harried hands around You

And pinned You down in panic.

Because we cannot have a migrant God,

Unsettling our comfortable doctrines of ease and self-import,

We nailed Your feet to the boards of our creeds,

In hopes that You would finally stay in one place.

But then we find You moving still –

Beyond our absorption,

Beyond our awareness;

Beyond our grievance,

Beyond our grave.

We find You wandering into lands we dared not enter,

With people we thought not Your type.

We find Your speaking and silent,

Tearning down and building up,

Bursting in and seemingly absent.

And we note the way You are still so very unlike ourselves.

Our minds cannot contain You,

Our hearts are fit to burst with desire

To be less stationary,

Less fixated,

And much more moved;

To let You tread across our world,

And amble through our lives.

And so,

In a daring task of faith,

We ask for the great gift of freedom to wander along with You.