Please pray with me: God of mystery and marvel, in these final
dwindling hours of 2023, give us moments to pause and gaze at the rearview
mirror of life. Help us see how the
months and weeks of this past year have filled us with moments of joy and love,
peace, and hope. Help us embrace that
which is unresolved and may be unsolvable in our lives. Help us process our grief honestly, naming
and noticing the pain and heartbreak.
Help us honor the beautiful ordinariness of life. So often, O God, amid the bustle, life is a
blur, and we do not always sense the Sacred or get glimpses of Your grace. Thank you, O God, for moments when You
interrupted and disrupted our lives this past year ~ awaken our Sacred
Imaginations to where You showed up unannounced in 2023. Help us embrace this present moment, for
where we are, there You are too. Right
here in this moment, in all its beautiful brokenness and hopefulness and
messiness. Right here in this breath and
the one after that. For all that will
unfold on this final Friday of 2023, let us continue to sense a Christmas
promise and possibility, that You show up in the angels still softly singing
that we can’t always hear and stars still shining if we just look up to show us
the way. And as we begin to bid farewell
this year, we pray for the days to come.
We offer You are prayers for 2024.
We realize and recognize, O God, that You are not a genie in a bottle. Our holy relationship with You is not one we
can control or contain. You don’t come
with demands or decrees. We name our
hopes and dreams, because when we do, You begin to collaborate with us to
create something we never knew was possible. Still creating, cooking, crafting,
and caroling God, meet us here with a song that we begin to sing this day and
every day for weeks to come. Amen.
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