May We Stop Creating God in Our Image [A Prayer]

Good and gracious God,

We love you.

But,
the you we love
is the you we have created.

We love discovering that you
are much like us –
after all
we are created in your image,
right?

We love those moments
when when a piece of scripture
confirms the things
we long suspected
and gives us divine permission
to hold on to
biases,
judgement
and even damnation.

Unexpected God,
break into the “realities”
we have created.

Confirm within us
the thing that our spirits
already know –
that you are too big to be contained
in some limited earthly conceptualization.

Invite us to experience
the breadth and depth of you
in a way
we have never before
felt secure in exploring.

Direct us toward a faith
that is not dependent upon certainty –
a faith that is fascinated with
the questions –
a faith that gains energy and strength
in the uncertainty
which points to the existence
of something bigger
than we
could ever fully understand.

May we find humility
in that knowledge.

May it gut our overstated piousness
to its core
and created in us
a God-shaped space
that seeks out
only the reality
of you –
a reality
founded in,
nurtured by,
reliant upon,
enlivened with

love.

Teach us to make love
our default position.

And in that God-shaped space,
may we find
an unending desire
to envelope the world
and all the people in it
with a grace and love
that it has never known before.

Amen.

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