Everyday Blessing

God bless you and keep you,

Always in Light.

God guard you and guide you,

Whatever your fight.

God with you and love you,

In depth or in height.

God for you,

 Restore you,

By day and by night.

Prayer on Psalm 23

O Lord, you are my shepherd and my Divine King. Because YOU ARE, I will not suffer in want. Help me to trust you to meet my needs.

You, O Lord, provide for me time and space for rest.  Let me willingly and eagerly go to lie in your green pastures! Let me rest by the peaceful still waters and allow you to restore my soul.  In your presence I am made whole.

O Lord, lead me in right paths and for your name’s sake grant me grace to go only where you lead, ever forsaking my own ways.

Sometimes I walk through deep and dark valleys, yet you are with me and evil cannot touch me.  You protect me, even with your Holy rod and staff to correct and guide.  Lord, forever keep me from harm.

You feed me, My Lord, at your table until I am more than satisfied … even in the presence of those who wish me evil. You honor me, anointing my head with oil, filling me with your Spirit. I am in awe.

May your goodness and mercy follow me all of my days. Lord, let me dwell in your Kingdom, now and forever.

AMEN

New Year: New Beginnings

Can it be that from our endings, new beginnings you create?

Life from death, and from our rendings, realms of wholeness generate?

Take our fears, then, Lord, and turn them into hopes for life anew:

Fading light and dying season sing their Glorias to you.

Words by Dean W. Nelson, 1988, in Wonder, Love, and Praise

My Prayer

Lord, as this year ends I thank you for all the days and the ways that you touched my life. As the new year begins I look with anticipation to the days ahead, believing that you will continue to bring light and wholeness to all the areas of my life. I look around at the events of this earth and it would be easy to enter this new year in fear for the future, yet I choose instead to enter it in faith, praying that you will bring about the fulfillment of your plans for this planet. I pray that you will bring into reality the things you have spoken to my own heart, and that I will accept the challenges and allow you to form me into the person I really am. Jesus, dear Jesus, you came and you changed everything. It is in you that I hope. It is for you that I sing: Gloria!           Amen

Longing for Jesus

I just want to sit at your feet, lean my head on your knee, and be.

Jesus, sometimes lately I wonder if I know you at all. You are so much more than I know, so much more than I have experienced, so much more than I have the capacity to understand. Advent is near; that time of year when we await your coming. That time of year when we remember the God babe that came to earth. I shall pray that you come again to my heart, and break through the crust that seems to have formed about it. You came, you’ll come again, but right now I just need you to come to me. Or maybe what I need is that I’ll be able to feel that you are here.

Jesus, I do not deserve such, but let me sit at your feet, lean my head on your knee, and be. AMEN

Death is Everywhere

It seems like death is everywhere I look these days. A co-workers father dead of a heart attack. A friend of a friend, someone whom I have met, died in a tragic fire. The mother of a friend died suddenly of a heart attack, after having survived several smaller ones. A young police officer from my city died when his car went off the road into a lake. This list goes on, not to mention what I read in the paper and see on the news.  I can only pray that this death theme does not hit any closer to home, so to speak. It will one day, of course; I just hope and pray it’s not in the near future.

I much less afraid of dying myself than I am of living through the death of someone I love. I saw in the paper a few weeks back an obituary for a young woman and right below it was one for this same woman’s mother. They died of different causes but less than a day apart. The daughter went first; I must wonder if the mother didn’t die of a broken heart.

Prayer~~~~~God, comfort those who weep. Comfort those for whom it seems there is no comfort. Help us, all of your creation, to make some sense of death and of life. Help us to live our lives well. Give us the grace to die well. Give us strength to say good-bye when we must……And God, just so you know, I really can’t imagine what you were thinking when you set things up this way. It’s just too, too sad.  I don’t understand, but yet I am yours.  Amen.

Think, Write, Feel…It’s All Connected

I think perhaps the reason that I don’t write sometimes goes far deeper than the fact that I’m busy, even though that may be true. To write I must think deeply, and that takes energy that I may not feel I have at the moment. But beyond that, to write well I must allow myself to feel and experience my own emotions, and that is not always comfortable. So I protect myself, and find things that don’t really matter to fill those moments when I know I’m being tugged at by the Holy Spirit to allow myself to feel things I’d rather ignore. I’m too busy to think. I’m too busy to write. I’m too busy to be me. Yes, I make myself too busy to be me! Like it or not, that mixed bag of emotions, half formed thoughts, fears shoved under the carpet, and hopes I’ve yet to dare to hope are all a part of me. To deny it is to deny myself, yet that is what I choose to do.

Prayer~~~~~ Lord, grant to me grace enough to face myself and all that that means. Help me to love myself enough to take the time to listen to all the parts clammoring for attention. Help me to trust you enough to be….me.    AMEN

The Fate of Glory

My quiet (at least when I am at home) life is back to being quiet. After a brief 2 1/2 days home dear daughter moved into her apartment near the university she attends, and will begin her last year of college on Monday. I find that I miss her all the time, even when she IS here, simply because she is not REALLY here anymore. The mother/daughter dynamic has been forever changed by this point. Not that this is bad, it just is, and it is different.

My daughter is better than I am at many things, not the least of which is the way she treats  houseplants.  Yes, houseplants. I’ve never been very good at houseplants and even the ones that are easy to grow generally fail to grow much for me. I did once have a plant called a ‘prayer plant’ for over 10 years, but that may have had more to do with the fact that the plant folded it’s lovely leaves in prayer each evening when the sun went down than it had to do with my care of it. Anyway, 2 years ago daughter and I each bought a small philodendron at the grocery store. We repotted them with the same soil. She took her plant to college with her, talked to it, water it, carried it home in a box when she came for holiday breaks, and named it Glory. I watered mine and hoped for the best. Two years later, Glory is huge, several feet long, and my little plant has grown maybe 6 inches. At least it is still alive.

I lamented to daughter over the fact that her plant was a giant, while mine still a midget. “Do you talk to it?,” she asked. “Did you name your plant?”  No and no.

I was left in charge of Glory this summer while daughter worked at a camp in another state. With some trepidation I accepted the challenge. I watered her and talked to her at the same time. Sometimes I’d just go in to say ‘HI’. I prayed for God’s blessing on the little, or rather not so little, plant.  Hubby even said ‘good morning’ a few times. Glory made it through the summer with only one yellow leaf. What a relief! Then yesterday, when I am helping daughter unload her car which she had parked the day before in front of the apartment, what, or rather who, do we find forgotten in the car? A very wilted and slightly cooked Glory. I was shocked! Not only that, but little Braveheart (Jade plant sprout) was there, forgotten, as well. Shaking my head I carried the poor plants to the kitchen and poured cool water on the soil and the leaves and urged them to live in spite of it all. What will happen to poor old Glory is now in the hands of her Creator. I told daughter that she’d probably need to prune Glory rather severely to save her, but I thought she might make it. We’ll see.

I’m sure there is a really profound spiritual point to this story, but it hasn’t come to me yet.  The only thing I can come up with is “don’t forget about something or someone you care for”, or “a little neglect can lead to a quick death.”  I don’t know. I think it’s time to go say a prayer for daughter and her plants.

God: The Master Weaver

OUR PART is to pray;
God’s part is to weave everything
into the tapestry
of the divine will.

From page 95 of Talking in the Dark: Praying When Life Doesn’t Make Sense by Steve Harper. Copyright © 2007 by the author. Published by Upper Room Books.

Professional weavers of old often had assistants who performed the task of setting up the loom with the warp threads. After that, the master weaver wove the tapestry. Only he or she would have the skill to use the warp and weft threads together to form the intricate pattern envisioned for the tapestry.

When we pray we are as the assistant, setting things up. Only God can actually weave the tapestry. Yet how often do we try to tell the Master Weaver how to weave? We need to remember that we simply do not have the skill, nor the vision, to do this. Our headstrong attempts would lead to disaster should the Weaver allow us to have our way.

**Prayer **        Lord, help me to pray and then completely release those prayers to you. Only you can see the whole picture. Only you can use those concerns I lift to you in prayer to weave the divine tapestry of my own life and the lives of the others for whom I pray. I worship you, Master Weaver. I desire to trust you more.  Amen.

Travel Light

He who would travel happily must travel light.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery
           French writer (1900 – 1944)

There’s a lot of truth in this little phrase. On a practical note, think about traveling by plane. On a recent trip I took only a carry-on bag. I managed to pack enough for the four days I was gone and avoided the stress of picking up luggage and maybe having it get lost. I hope I can manage to pack as light the next time I take a trip.

Now lets consider another type of travel; the life journey. It’s a little harder to pack light on this one. Some things are like lead weights in the bag; bitterness, unforgiveness, and envy are three of a long list. Then there are the things that aren’t so heavy but just take up a lot of space, like needless regrets and people and things we just can’t seem to let go of. Some people even insist on carrying other people’s baggage, making travel even more complicated and exhausting.

Prayer for Life Travel                                                                            

Lord, help me pack my bags well, with only the things you know I need for the journey. Give me the courage to leave the unnecessary behind. Give me the strength to lay aside, once and for all,  those heavy things that weigh me down. Finally, reveal to me any bags I carry that don’t belong to me. Set me free, dear Jesus, the Master of traveling light. Set me free to travel light.    AMEN.

Prayer

I read an awesome piece on prayer by mompriest at Seeking Authentic Voice.  Check it out!!  Below is a small excerpt.

“Prayer is less about changing God and more about changing us. Prayer is not so much about what God is doing for us. Prayer is about God being in us. When we pray we open ourselves up to God and allow God to work in us and through us.”