This week has been hard. I’ve felt weary and downtrodden by all the noise, by the executive orders and the alternative facts, by the fakes news and real news and everything in between. Maybe you have, too?
Thursday afternoon, as I walked Josie along the perimeter of the golf course, I noticed they’d cut down several trees. All that remained were jagged stumps, scattered branches, sawdust, and tire tracks ground deep into the mud and frozen grass.
Even though rationally I knew the management had every right to remove the trees, I felt betrayed. I’d come to think of the golf course as my own personal winter nature sanctuary, and now it was ravaged, ugly, the earth scarred, the landscape bare.
I worried about the owls who call back and forth from the white pine trees at dusk. I wondered about the fox we’ve seen trotting jauntily from green to green, bushy orange tail swinging.
The ravaged golf course seemed like a perfect metaphor for the state of my heart and my soul.
Our walk done, Josie and I stepped from the golf course back onto my neighborhood street, and that’s when I felt the Glory Be prayer rise up with my breath.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
I’ve been repeating this prayer to myself a lot lately. I started reciting it multiple times a day after hearing it at the end of the daily prayer on the Pray-as-You-Go app I listen to each morning. The more often I hear it, the more often I find myself repeating it under my breath throughout the day.
It grounds me, gives me something to dig my roots into.
In that moment, as I stood with my dog on the edge of the muddy golf course, I understood the wisdom of this prayer as if for the first time, and it comforted me.
God in three Persons has been here long before what we know as the beginning.
He is here with us now.
He will be with us forever, long into the future as we understand it and beyond.
There’s a stabilizing comfort in that, a certain unshakeable solidity that gives me both hope and perspective.
God is bigger than this, whatever our “this” may be. He’s here with us in it, but at the same time, he’s bigger than whatever it is that’s ravaging the landscape of our souls.
God transcends past, present, and future. He simply has been, is, and will always be.
Glory be.
