To A Weary God

Are You tired, God?

Are You tired of rocking me,

            rocking me,

                        endlessly rocking me,

as You try to comfort my distress?

Are You weary of walking the floor

while I,

                        too tired to know that I’m tired,

            wriggle and writhe,

                        sputter and scream,

                                    all the while looking up at You and saying

                                                “Why aren’t You doing anything to help me?”

Yet there You are,

            gently holding me in Your safe, strong arms,

                        softly kissing my cheek,

                                    blowing Your warm breath over my face

doing everything a parent could do

            and wishing

that I would only stop sputtering

                                    long enough

                                                to see that everything is okay.

Are You tired, God?

            Are You weary, knowing

                        that even if You help me to sleep

                                    I will only wake up in an hour or two

                                                (or less)

                        and we’ll start this whole

                                    dance

                                                over again?

Oh God                                   I’ll try to sleep through the night.

Of Gratitude and Grace

Last evening a group of us gathered at Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist to explore the topic of "gratitude."  We've recently begun organizing our lifespan faith development efforts -- and in this I include our weekly worship -- around monthly themes.  In September we explored "hospitality."  In October we're dancing with "Atonement."  Next month our theme will be "gratitude," and our conversation last night was a way for our religious education leaders, and anyone else who was interested, to get a head start on thinking about our next month's focus.  (And the rich conversation also gave me gold for the sermons I'll be preaching!)

One of the things we did during this Conversation on Gratitude was to create collaborative an acrostic poem.  We thought about words that we associate with the idea of "gratitude" and then we took one of those words and wrote it vertically down the side of a piece of paper.  We then brainstormed words and phrases which begin with each of the letters of that word, and wove those together to create our poem.  (This is one of the things that our congregation's children will be doing during their religious explorations next month.)

Here is the poem we created:

          Gift of gladness
          Received and reciprocated.
          Aware of awe.   Ahhhhhhh.
          Cultivating communion with the cosmos.
          Embodying the energy of the entwined.

In Gassho,

RevWik