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Posts from the ‘Prayer’ Category

Jan 10

19 Comments

Fragmented People

This past Sunday’s sermon touched briefly on the experience of meaninglessness. The text was Genesis 1:1-5 and I focused on how the creation narrative portrays God speaking life and light and beauty and purpose into the cosmos. Yet so often, in our world and in our lives, this seems more than we can believe. We postmoderns are restless people who have difficulty accepting that there is a big story within which our individual crazy, chaotic stories can find their place. We are fragmented and unmoored people who are divided and distracted in so many ways.   Read more

Dec 5

Welcomed From a Distance

One of my morning Scripture readings today was the famous “by faith” passage in Hebrews 11 that talks about how the heroes of faith did not receive “the things promised” and lived as “foreigners and strangers” on earth.  It’s a beautiful text, a powerful portrayal of longing, faith, and hope. Read more

Dec 2

4 Comments

It Is To You My Heart Calls

One of my trusted companions throughout each Advent Season over the last few years has been a little reader put together by the folks at Regent College called The Candle and the Crown. Each day there are two Scripture readings and short reflections by Regent faculty, alumni, and others—one for the morning and one for the evening.

Among the Scripture readings this week was the twenty-seventh Psalm, which has long been one of my favourite psalms. The combination of joyful, expectant hope, longing, and raw honesty has made this psalm a frequent destination for me. As with so many of the Psalms (and Scripture in general), I find that these ancient words narrate and interpret my own experience so many years later. Read more

Oct 14

21 Comments

The Hospital

I have never liked hospitals. Hospitals can so often seem to be places where we attempt to sequester the pain and confusion and despair that are a part of so many lives—to keep them out of sight and out of mind. When we go to the hospital, we look in a mirror and we see ourselves in 5, 10, 20, 50 years—it doesn’t really matter how long. The question isn’t if but when we will take our place amongst all of these broken down worn out decaying bodies. Read more

Sep 21

8 Comments

“We Are Distracting Ourselves Into Spiritual Oblivion”

I’m in the midst of a very busy stretch right now, so there’s not a lot of time for original posts. This morning, however, in the midst of my busyness, I came across a few prescient quotes from Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing on the struggles we often have with paying attention to and nourishing our spiritual lives. Rolheiser identifies three main things that work against what he calls a sense of “interiority,” and all three seem to pretty  much hit the nail on the head: narcissism, pragmatism, and unbridled restlessness. Here’s a bit of what I read prior to heading out into another busy (!) day: Read more

Aug 2

2 Comments

Good News… Please

The church of Christ is in the business of proclaiming good news, in word and deed. This is our reason for being. Somehow, we believe that the good news concerning Jesus of Nazareth has changed, continues to change, and will one day finally change things in our lives and in our world. Good news changes things.

This is what we say.

And yet there are moments when it all seems so unbelievable. Read more

Apr 4

11 Comments

A Good Sleep

Every night, bedtime prayers with my kids conclude with some version of the same phrase: “And help ____ to have a good sleep with no bad dreams.  Amen.” This is the non-negotiable conclusion to all bedtime prayers in our house. Should I omit or modify this peroration in any way, this transgression will be swiftly brought to my attention, and I will be enthusiastically exhorted to rectify the situation. The day is not complete, it seems, without entrusting our sleep and the subconscious cogitations it may or may not contain, to the care of God. Read more

Mar 13

7 Comments

“We Are Asking God to be God”

Each week at our Sunday services, before the children are dismissed, we take time to recite the Lord’s Prayer together. As with anything that is done repeatedly over long periods of time, if we are inattentive it can come to seem mechanical and tedious. Rather than being a vehicle for shaping and inspring us as Christ’s followers, it can come to seem like little more than part of the furniture. Frederick Buechner reminds us why we ought not to allow this to happen: Read more

Mar 11

22 Comments

Thinking and Praying

A post from 2009 called “Our Thoughts Are With You” has been getting an unusual amount of traffic today due, I can only assume, to people’s wrestling with how to think and respond to the unfolding tragedy in Japan. I have received a few emails today loosely related to the question of how (if at all) we are to talk about suffering, whether from the perspective of belief in a providential God or not. Do we attempt to “explain” or are all such attempts offensive by definition? Do we say we are praying? Thinking? Do our hearts go out to those affected? Our minds? Our hands and feet? Our wallets? We see images and hear stories like the ones coming out of Japan, and feel we must have something to say. So… what?

To be sure, it is always somewhat perilous to force words into the context of suffering (I think of Job’s “miserable comforters“), but I thought I would re-post an edited version of the original today. Read more

Sep 14

A Thousand Glad Answers

It’s been a while since Walter Brueggemann made an appearance around here, so I thought I would share another one of his prayers as I sit down to begin another work week.  I came across this prayer from Prayers for a Privileged People during last week’s service preparations.  Among other things, it seems to me a good reminder of the continual process of disorientation and reorientation that is inherent in the life of faith: Read more

Sep 11

5 Comments

Listening for Life

Of the many things back to school week represents a return to, more regular breakfasts with the kids is among them.  Yesterday morning, the kids were poring over a calendar that mom had laid out on the table in an attempt to get our fall schedule coordinated as a family.  Aside from the events that happen to pertain to them, the kids have always taken an interest in the various holidays that show up on the calendar. Read more

May 21

The Breaking of Silence

Someday I will probably tire of quoting the poetic and profound words of Frederick Buechner (indeed, it may even be that you have already tired of reading them!).  But for me, that day hasn’t come yet. This morning I read this passage on prayer, taken from a sermon called “The Breaking of Silence” in The Magnificent Defeat, this morning: Read more

Apr 18

2 Comments

You, Beyond Our Weary Selves

You God, Lord and Sovereign,
you God, lover and partner.
You are God of all our possibilities.
You preside over all our comings and goings,
all our wealth and all our poverty,
all our sickness and all our health,
all our despair and all our hope,
all our living and all our dying.
And we are grateful.

You are God of all our impossibilities.
You have presided over the emancipations
and healings of our mothers and fathers;
you have presided over the wondrous transformations in our own lives.
You have and will preside over those parts of our lives that
we imagine to be closed.
And we are grateful.

So be your true self, enacting the things impossible for us,
that we might yet be the whole among the blind who see and
the dead who are raised;
that we may yet witness your will for peace,
your vision for justice,
your vetoing all our killing fields.

At the outset of this day,
we place our lives in your strong hands.
Before the end of this day,
do newness among us in the very places where
we are tired in fear,
we are exhausted in guilt,
we are spent in anxiety.

Make all things new, we pray in the new-making name of Jesus.

Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People

Mar 31

A World Addressed

From Walter Brueggemann’s Prayers for a Privileged People, in the midst of a week where dreams, possibilities, and disequilibrium are on our minds—in the midst of a week where we are reminded of God’s strange and beautiful address: Read more

Mar 21

13 Comments

On Prayer

A couple of memorable quotes on prayer I came across today, from two very different sources: Read more

Jan 22

22 Comments

Prayer: You Place a Reservoir Within My Heart

Perhaps surprisingly, given my occupation and the fact that one of my main (and most rewarding) tasks on any given Sunday is leading our congregation in prayer, I often find prayer difficult. The reasons for this vary. Sometimes I am paralyzed by the relative insignificance of my own needs when compared by the suffering others are facing (this week has been an especially difficult one for prayer, given the situation in Haiti). Sometimes I don’t know what to pray for. Sometimes I don’t know what prayer accomplishes—in my own life and character and for those I pray for. Sometimes I am simply lazy and undisciplined. Sometimes the silence of heaven wearies me. Read more

Jan 8

12 Comments

The Small Ways

The first weeks of January are often times full of big plans, big promises, big expectations, and big dreams. It was good to be reminded by Walter Brueggemann this morning of the significance of “smallness” in God’s economy. This is from Prayers for a Privileged People: Read more

Dec 3

4 Comments

Waiting

Advent is about waiting for the God who comes. There is no more central conviction to the Christian faith that we worship and follow a God who has come, who continues to come, and who will come. At the same time, there is probably also no more central experience to a life of following Christ in the in-between time—the time between his first and second Advents—than waiting.  Christ has come. Christ is coming. But still, we wait. Read more

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