Holy God,
In the very beginning, you created.
Light and darkness, sea and sky,
and all you made was good.
All was good, and then you got to us.
Dust of earth, breath of life.
You made us, but the making was incomplete.
For the first time in your creation, God,
you named it wasn’t good, it wasn’t good that we be alone.
So you created again, like you do.
Made us in your likeness,
made us to need one another.
From the very beginning, your desire for us,
our need for each other,
has been baked into our very being.
So God, for the ways your holy desire
shows up in our togetherness,
for the relationships we hold close,
that feel like we were made for this,
we give you all our gratitude.
Lord in your mercy, hear our prayers.
From the very beginning,
you knew it was not good for us to be alone.
And from the very beginning,
we have tested the idea that it might be.
So we cultivate lives that isolate us from one another,
create neighborhoods with yards that push our neighbors farther,
constrict identities to profile pages,
look at devices, so we don’t have to see each other.
We collect our differences,
building insurmountable piles of reasons
as to why it is better that we be alone.
But it doesn’t work, Creator God.
You knew it wouldn’t.
Somewhere inside us,
deep in the dust of our making,
we desperately want to be found,
want to be connected,
want to know we’re not in this alone.
So God, break down all the things we build around ourselves,
untie the knots we’ve tangled our hearts into,
call us again, create us again,
that we might see each other, and be changed.
Lord in your mercy, hear our prayers.
You created us to be together,
and even from the depths of our loneliness we confess,
we wish you had made us another way.
For our isolation is not accidental, God.
As soon as you created us,
we learned to hurt one another.
Loneliness is painful, God.
But relationship can be, too.
So we lift up to you the scars we carry -
the things that need healing,
the pieces our our hearts that ache
from the things we do to each other.
Take us and heal us, God.
And what can’t yet be healed, just hold for us, won’t you?
Let us rest in you, as you connect us to one another
in ways that might bring wholeness,
in ways that might help us see you in each other again.
Lord in your mercy, hear our prayers.
From the very beginning, you made us this way -
unable to exist alone,
called into community where we don’t have to.
Your greatest commandment to love each other,
our salvation rooted in the care of one another,
our very being, bound up in the rest of humanity.
So help us in this days, holy God,
to see you in each other.
Bind us together in community that is necessary, and messy,
that is often broken, and always possible of beauty.
Bind us to one another, God,
and reveal yourself in our midst.
For it is for days this divided that you taught us to pray,
only together, your one body in this world,
so we pray together saying, Our Father…