It must be like déjà vu, God —
you’ve been here before,
seen this before,
watched us have these arguments before,
adored us every time we reinvented the wheel before,
moved & whispered so that we felt Spirit-led before.
Bless your heart, God, for putting up with us,
for witnessing our pursuit of all things new & trending
while sitting on your hands to refrain from
writing in the clouds:
“Been there. Done that.”
Our hopes, our fears, our headlines that
this one thing will be the “best ever” and another
the “worst in history” are all for naught,
for there is nothing new
under your gaze and nothing
revolutionary within our capacity that surprises
your imagination. Forgive our vanity.
You hold the sunrise, the sunset,
and the very suspension of time within your being,
while we applaud ourselves like
blades of grass for managing to grow toward the sun
before fading and withering under the heat.
You birthed all creation while we
burn the midnight oil and gulp endless caffeine
over the crafting of one idea, to be signed and notarized
and advertised as original to us, as if
such a thing were truly possible.
Does it make you laugh
or cry
to watch us? For all the effort
that we invest in standing out to one another,
in making our mark on the world, do you even notice us
distinctly when you look across history, across
an endless list of others who also have
dreamt and striven and crafted?
Let me set down the burden
of trending or
standing out
today. Let me pick up
this gratitude for waking to
another day with the same old breath to breathe,
the same old love to give, the same old work to do,
and the same old you within it all:
the One who does not
startle easily or fret anxiously every time the
(not actually) new appears, the One
who announces the truly New with “Do not fear,”
the One who is, who was, who remains
while I try to reinvent myself with the dawn of every day.
Let me not be new — let me be faithful and
walk faithfully in the light of your
unending, unchanging love.
on Ecclesiastes 1:9