A magnetic gaze at the wind and the clouds and trees,

knowing You are so much beyond me.

The cling to my tiny girl, hair against my cheek, smelling her skin as long as she’ll briefly let me, feeling something is just out of my grasp, and Your plan and creation is unfathomable.

A conscious, intended breath or several, and the surrounding pause as I re-ground and You are with me.

The trembling, quickening, urgent feasting on sunsets, impossible as they are to understand, realizing this is a little bit like You: terrifying, deep, gigantic, glorious, transformative. Holy.

Finding words to illumine what is – and they’re jolly good ones.

Receiving sun warmth, in no hurry.

When Your children are in my home, assembled like a gladsome fighting force, willing to work and battle by way of food and praise and love and prayer,

sharing with the others what each is given. I look around and am stilled, lifted, comforted in the presence of the joy warriors, the persistent gatherers, who know their need and He who meets it.

Silence.

Pain.

Grandeur of infinite mountaintop perspectives, windowless in the ideal way,

as though it was really true that nothing mattered more than You.

When I, mid-song, choke and weep without warning, Your Spirit clearly, mysteriously about Your business.

Speeding heartbeats after a narrow escape of accident or calamity; Your providence bids me live on unscathed.

Opening of lips to receive Your welcome in bread and wine, assenting to what I only barely grasp, but which grasps me entirely and makes me whole.

[This wee post was inspired by Malcolm Guite’s Word in the Wilderness; in one essay he encourages his readers to make a listing poem of images of the emblems of prayer in our lives. These are some of mine.]