I started thinking about this after supper tonight, and it continued to run through my mind up until the Lenten service started, so I decided to write. What I wrote turned into a prayer, and I thought I'd share it.
Lord,
You speak to us in many forms… visions, voices - be they through others or audible only within our own minds - through song - a language of our soul - through your written Word, and in silence… Silence is perhaps the most difficult form. We're so accustomed to the chaos and cacophony of the world in which we live that when SILENCE is the response to our ceaseless rain of questions, we don't know what to do with it. Quite often we simply interpret it as a lack of response - attributing it to an unresponsive, unconcerned, distant God, one removed from our suffering, from our pain, from our breaking hearts and bursting minds. But how, Lord, how can we presume to wrap our intellect around you? How can we listen to the silence? What do we do while we wait - wait in our brokenness, suffocating in our selves? What have you given us to cling to as we strain to hear something - anything - in the silence that, too, is Your voice? What are your promises? Please help us remember them. Who is your body? Please help us to lean on them, allowing them to support us, for they are you - the body of your head.
And there the prayer ended. Partly because I wanted to pay closer attention to the service, and partly because it's a prayer that doesn’t have an end.
