The God Who Yearns and Waits for Us

I've been pondering Romans 8 quite deeply again lately, and had to smile when, the other night, as I turned to the next prayer in Walter Bruggemann's wonderful "Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth" it contained lines also drawn from that passage. The prayer, titled the same as this post, read:

We are strange conundrums of faithfulness and fickleness.
We cleave to you in all the ways that we are abled.
We count on you and intend our lives to be lived for you,
and then we find ourselves among your people
who are always seeking elsewhere and otherwise.
So we give thanks that you are the God
who yearns and waits for us,
and that our connection to you is always from your side,
and that it is because of your goodness
that neither life nor death
nor angels nor principalities
nor heights nor depths
nor anything in creation
can separate us from you.
We give you thanks for your faithfulness,
so much more durable than ours. Amen.

(Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth, pg. 135)