Strangers to hope

We did not always have these words:

ways to be like him and unlike the world

ways to find him and ourselves

ways to become ourselves in the world

God was not always here with us.

Long stretches of centuries,

filled by the strivings of ignorant, contented living

changeless, endless centuries

projected like corridors without beginning and end

all through which we traveled and travailed,

until disrupted by a host of great acts

uprooting the world's foundations

and our foundations in the world.

We were now faced with such an offer:

God's claim to be with us and over us

created out of the sterile ruins of wilderness,

the possibility of abundant life:

life-after-desert.

We were strangers to this hope.

Strangers to:

covenant dealings

divine showings

but we were never strangers to

human longings

facing uncounted weary

days and nights

that is, before now—until now.

Teach us to count the days,

to number in our memories

in the stories we tell our children

to re-mark with our telling

be re-made in our hearing

the dusk of your nearing

the nights of our waiting

the dawn of our hoping

the days of your appearing

Remind us to recount your words,

to memorialize in our minds

and mark with our bodies

the deep through which you've brought us

—pain and joy a thousand years overwhelming—

the height to which you'll bring us

and the promise to be filled out that

all strangers to hope will find home with you.