A childlike people

Another cool, misty dawn.
I wake up in darkness and offer my morning prayer
to You, Lord, thanking You
beyond what my words can express.
You have saved me, and given me another day.
Whatever is Your will for me today, Lord, let it be done.
Help me to follow You.

There is a covering of grey, translucent clouds hanging low over the city as I drive to work. Crossing the Columbia River, I look eastwards down its course and see the silhouette of Mount Hood, sharply defined against a brightening sky in the sliver of clarity between earth and clouds. It arises from its blankets of fog to greet the morning, its crest almost disappearing again in the waters above the firmament. No wonder the native people venerated the peak as a god, Wy’east, and gave him personality. They were a childlike people.

My thoughts drifted between prayer and memory.

Japan, and the dawn, its sun rising as a red disk against an off-white, cloudless sky. There too, a childlike people invest a mountain with personality, Fuji-sama, as he arises in a gentle slope from the sea, but his peak is high and mighty, also a god, a kami, watching over his islands and his people. Encircling him a host of ordinary mountains like attendants. The dreams of a childlike people, to console them with hopes of what they know not, to allay their fears of what they do know—death.

Father, let these childlike people awaken,
putting off their coverings of myth, to meet Your Son.
The roots of our fears strike deeper than we dream.

Lord, uproot these tares
that Your hands have not planted,
and plant Your true seed in us and in them,
so that we can stand up and see You as You are,
and know that You are with us,
as You promised, even
to the end of the ages.
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