December Prayers: Make Us Your People

A brief but meaningful prayer from N.T. Wright:

"Lord, teach us to pray; teach us to forgive; make us your people. Yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory."

December Prayers: Loving My 'Neighbor'

The following comments and prayer is taken from Prayers and Meditations of Therese of Lisieux:

"...we more often treat those around us as inconsequential than as holy. People can be irritating and mean-tempered and our instinctive reaction is to give as good as we get. Therese felt the same impulse but, clinging to the gospel, she returned good for evil."

Her prayer related to this:

"Lord, nothing you ask me to do seems as difficult as loving my 'neighbor.' Give me the strength not only to love when my 'neighbor' is most unlovable, but to find joy in doing so. Prevent me from giving way to the impatience and anger that wounds others. Help me to act on the knowledge that we are all created in your image. Through Christ our Lord. Amen."

December Prayers: Peace for My Soul

The following prayer is from St Francesca Xavier Cabrini (late 19th century):

                         Fortify me with the grace of Your Holy Spirit and give Your peace to my soul 
                         that I may be free from all needless anxiety, solicitude and worry. 
                         Help me to desire always that which is pleasing and acceptable to You 
                         so that Your will may be my will.

December Prayers: Love More Powerful than Knowledge

Taken from the book, The St. Francis Prayer Book:                           

                                     Abba, Father, 
                                     cleanse our hearts of sin this day,
                                     reminding us that love is more powerful
                                     than knowledge or judgment.
                                     Fill our weak vessels with the
                                     fruits of righteousness,
                                     through Jesus Christ,
                                     for your glory and honor. Amen.

December Prayers: Longing to Know God

As the year draws to a close, I plan to periodically share simple prayers from scripture and other sources with the hope that the reader's heart will be strengthened and encouraged to complete the year in peace and grace and to face the new year with hope.

I begin with the following prayer from Cuigo the Carthusian:

Lord, you are not seen except by the pure of heart. I seek by reading and meditating what is true purity of heart and how it may be had, so that with its help I may know you, if only a little.
Lord, for long I have meditated in my heart, seeking to see your face. It is the sight of you, Lord, that I have sought; and all the while in my meditation the fire of longing, the desire to know you  more fully, has increased...So give me, Lord, some pledge of what I hope to inherit, at least one drop of heavenly rain with which to refresh my thirst, for I am on fire with love. 
                                           

God Feels Our Pain With Us

A reader shared the following prayer taken from George MacDonald's book, The Lady's Confession; I was very moved and blessed by this prayer so want to share it with the rest of you:

"Father, through your Son you know pain and even now you feel the pain of this your child. Help her to endure until you should say it is enough. Let it not overmaster her patience; let it not be too much for her. What good it shall work in her, Lord, we do not need to instruct you." 

This is my prayer for each of you today as you face whatever challenge and difficulty there may be in your life...

The Life, Thought, Words and Deeds of Jesus Bring the Blurry Picture of God into Focus

My desire is to know and love God. This sounds appealing in theory, but prioritizing this in one's life is costly because it means letting go of having to be 'right.'

As fallen humans we are more prone to want to be 'right' than we are to want to know God, as seen in the creation story where humans prioritize the tree of knowledge over the tree of life. This doesn't mean there is no right nor wrong but that we don't have the capacity to independently know which is which and must depend on God (tree of life) to discern right from wrong in a life-giving way. From experience, I know that to grow in the intimate knowledge of God means being willing to let go of judgmentalism which gives us a sense that we know best and are 'right' and the other is 'wrong'.

So the first step in knowing God is to want to know and live in God's love more than to want to be right; we start by simply asking for that desire. Then as we set our hearts to wanting God above wanting our own understanding of 'right and wrong' (Prov 3:5), we need to know where to go to see what the Father is like. George MacDonald has beautifully expressed where to look in knowing the Father:

"...no man can, with thorough honesty, take the name of Christian whose ideas of the Father of men are gathered from any other field than the life, thought, words, and deeds of the only Son of that Father...it is not from the Bible as a book that we are to draw our ideas of God, but from the living Man into whose presence that book brings us, who is alive now, and gives his Spirit that they who read about him may understand what kind of being he is..."

Only in Jesus do we truly know what God is like; He brings the blurry picture of God into focus. God is Christlike. This is good news indeed, and while it seems it should be obvious, many of us who are Jesus followers miss what a radical message this is. May we have ears to hear and eyes to see what the Spirit has to say and show us about the Father in Jesus.