Yet all too often we don’t see beyond our own interests. We can easily fall into a mindset that approaches your creation - and all that lives within it - as though we are its owners and it is ours to use as we see fit - instead of approaching it as your stewards.
We mask creation’s witness to your awesome beauty whenever our choices lead to harm, destruction, and disaster. We sometimes fail to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves; even as simply and indirectly as by existing within systems which benefit us at the end but involve injustice, exploitation, and pollution earlier in the process.
So instead of always working together to fix-up your world, we sometimes degrade and harm it.
Forgive us.
Help us to relate to everyone and everything that surrounds us in ways which recognize that the universe is your sacred handiwork; that all of creation is where you appear and where we worship you.
You are a God of endless creativity, incomparable beauty, and bottomless grace. For this, we give you thanks.
Amen.
