loss

God: You are God indeed, the God of all. You are God of our comings and goings and strivings, and you are God of all that we cannot master or manage, force or control. You are God of our hopes and dreams, our scheming and our plans, but you are also God of all we attempt to wall out, to wall in, to force-feed or resuscitate or kill, but which bleeds through and around anyway. You are Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, the front and the tain of the mirror. We encounter you, God, broken and scattered, in the bread and the wine, both without and within, inside the margins and outside of them too, God in death and loss but also God of new life and joys beyond death and loss. In receiving these gifts may we learn to be, like these wide-scattered gifts, nimble navigators of boundaries and barriers, both those which wall up life and those which nourish and sustain life. We ask this in your name, the loving, the just, the merciful, the one God everlasting, in Jesus the Christ, and in the overflowing promiscuous ecstasy of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Submitted by Brian Cubbage, member and elder at Douglass Boulevard Christian Church (Louisville, KY) and he blogs at bcubbage.wordpress.com.