To the God who searches, sweeping Her entire household looking for the lost coin, who celebrates when She finds us, we give You thanks and praise. As we join together our voices, we thank You for the gift of each other — for family and dear friends, for all who have stood by us in our searching times, in our lost times and our found times. God of All Seekers, who dwells within our hearts, hold us close and nurture us in Your hidden depths. Open to us the purse of Your being that is large enough to hold the whole of creation, cozy enough to carry our hearts. Grant that we may seek to find within it a space to contain our goodness and humanness, as we have been formed women in Your own image. We ask You to give us gentleness with ourselves, to help us find patience with the less than perfect nature of our becoming. Bless us with the courage to make time, around and during, in and about the activities of our lives, to seek and be found.
God of Life-gathering Tenderness, we offer to You the separate strands of our lives. On Your loom of creation, weave each frayed and knotted thread into a fabric of continuity. With Your patient hand and through Your endless shuttle back and forth of effort, stitch Your pattern of completeness, of dying and rising, into the fabric of our spirits. With Your warp of grace, weave joy from our pain, back and forth, back and forth. Into the tapestry of our discouragement and fatigue, weave Your laughter and support, joy and rest. Bring us together — old, middle-aged, and young to be woven into a satchel strong enough to hold the grief of a pilgrim people. Or use the colored and diverse threads of our lives and form us into a basket to be carried on the journey, to contain the loaves and fishes of the miracle, to be opened before us to provide simple moments of possibility. For all of us woven into the web of Your creation, for all that is yet to be woven on Your loom, we pray thankfully to you, our Weaver God.
Copyright © 1999, Julie Henkener, https://juliehenkener.com.
Links to other prayers by Julie: Prayer for the Universe, Prayer for a Wholly Life, and Prayer Against Envy and Jealousy.
Photo Credit 1: Stephen Bugno, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, flickr.com, August 28, 2013.
Photo Credit 2: “Sunita Rokka weaving a Dhaka Shawl,” Dhaka Weaving Centre, Patichaur, Nepal, DFAT, Jim Holmes, CC BY 2.0, flickr.com, June 10, 2013.
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