Friday Prayer

 

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.