Tectonic plates beneath the ocean's surface (website only)

Tectonic plates beneath the ocean's surface,
uplifted, twisting life and limb and wave.
The landscape that was home has lost its features,
destruction means that few are left to save.

[See revised version of v1 below]

An empty chair amid such devastation
where cars like toys, are lifted, spun about;
and here we wait and pray in helpless anguish;
and 'where is God' we want to cry and shout.

Incarnate God we need your present spirit
to live within your people at this time,
to energise our prayerful words and actions,
to offer grace to life's discordant rhyme.

God offer hope to those who feel forsaken,
to those whose lives have spun and turned around;
to those whose grief defies all consolation,
bring grace and love and hope and solid ground.

[Verse 1 revised in 2023, in response to the Turkish-Syrian earthquakes]

Tectonic plates beneath this rock hard surface,
uplifted, twisting life and limb and steel.
The landscape that was home has lost its features,
destruction means that few are left to heal.

Words: Andrew Pratt (born 1948) © 2011 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England, www.stainer.co.uk. Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.

Metre: 11.10.11.10.

Suggested tunes: Highwood (StF 3; H&P 236); Intercessor (H&P 411)

See also Singing the moment