O, Creator: a prayer for the last week of Advent

O Creator,

This name is one of the most beautiful we can give you, because it speaks such pure truth-

You create and recreate us–and the hope of every being–day after day.

In our earliest beginnings, you crafted something sacred into us, insignificant breaths chosen for something larger, something more.

And further back to the first beginning, wherever and whenever it was, everything had a curated purpose under your watchful eye and gentle hand.

And so today and everyday, we look out and about to you, and then we return with the good gift of creation in ourselves.

Because the world still aches, because we live in an extended Advent season of waiting, we need to remember now, more than ever, that you create for us and in us, a constant motion of grace.

And while you send your creative love into us, forgive us for the creative spaces we have destroyed. Forgive us for taking the holy spaces of your craft or the people you created in tender love, and calling them dirt beneath our feet, because we could not see what you saw, could not understand what you call sacred.

Soon, we will begin those winter months of hibernation, so many creatures resting their bodies in the darkest caves and under the dirt to store their strength up for the spring, when work begins again.

How we wait for the spring and long for new life.

How the aching world begs of it from the smallest ant to the stampeding buffalo– we all beg for a better-healed world.

O Creator,

Take these prayers and create something with them.

Gather them into your hands and pull them to your chest and whisper them back out to the air, let the atmosphere carry them to the corners of the earth, our prayers for all the advent things– for love, for hope, for joy, for peace, for everything you are.

We pray that we may know you.

We pray that in knowing you, we know how to live.

O Creator, hear this Advent prayer and create in us, yet again.

Amen.