God’s steadfast love never ceases; God’s mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning: great is your faithfulness. – Lamentations 3:22-23 (NRSV)
Among Christians, even in the United Church of Christ, opinions about abortion vary. So I don’t know how gratified or sad you’re feeling after Friday’s Supreme Court decision. I don’t know if you’re heading out to protest, raising a celebratory toast, or weeping on the phone with a terrified friend. I don’t know if the bottom has fallen out of your life, or whether your prayers have been answered. And I don’t know whether any of us have yet to fully comprehend what is happening in this land.
But I know this: In ways that really count, today, so shattering for many, is no different from any other day in which we awake to life. Like every day, even days laden with evil, it’s a gift from God, a mercy. It’s a precious clearing in which to meet the Steadiness that undergirds each change and chance, and in that meeting to know again that no matter what befalls our fragile lives, or our fragile democracy, God will not fail to hold us night and morning. God will not fail to will and work the good of all creation. God will not fail to be God.
Which is not to paper over the dangerous divide among us, nor to deny the deep foreboding that stirs in the attentive heart. It’s only to bend the knee and pray, to bow the head and confess a bedrock, the unchanging Reality in whose heart we live. It’s only to say there is at least one sure thing.
It’s a place to begin, and to begin again.
Prayer
Unceasing are your mercies, new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.
