Advent Devotions

Today’s author is Prince of Peace member, Carol Swanson.

For the next four weeks we are focusing on Creation. Each Wednesday’s devotion will be a poem (a hymn text) by Brian Wren, a fine English hymn writer and poet.  With our week’s theme  and text in mind, “Creation…in the Balance,” and Psalm 8, I offer these verses by Brian Wren to contemplate.  He noted that his inspiration was from reading an early discussion on ecology and NASA photographs of the earth from space, “enrobed in its biosphere of ‘water, soil, and air.’”

#111

Thank you, God, for water, soil and air,
large gifts supporting everything that lives.
Forgive our spoiling and abuse of them.
Help us renew the face of the earth.

Thank you, God, for minerals and ores,
the basis of all building, wealth and speed.
Forgive our reckless plundering and waste.
Help us renew the face of the earth.

Thank you, God, for priceless energy,
stored in each atom, gathered from the sun.
Forgive our greed and carelessness of power.
Help us renew the face of the earth.

Thank you, God, for weaving nature’s life
into a seamless robe, a fragile whole.
Forgive our haste, that tampers unaware.
Help us renew the face of the earth.

Thank you, God, for making planet earth
a home for us, and ages yet unborn.
Help us to share, consider, save and store.
Come and renew the face of the earth.

––1975 copyright Hope Publishing Company

From Piece Together Praise: A Theological Journey by Brian Wren,p 106.