A Prayer for Today

 

Gracious God, we pray today for our country and community and trying to be your people at such a time as this.  We confess that we have not always learned from the past.  We continue to build boundaries between “us” and “them” in our neighborhoods, in our faith, in our lives and even family.  And while we would love to delight as Ross Gay invited us on Monday and Tuesday’s morning meditation, that muscle in our bodies and souls is weak.  Our minds love to object with all kinds of evidence of why delight and joy are “rewards” for making it to a certain place.  Delight and joy are often seen as future oriented, like when our mom said we couldn’t have dessert until we ate our Lima Beans!  We make joy the reward rather than the fuel that helps us keep on keeping on.  We make joy contingent on some objective met, as if we are both the student and teacher trying to get an “A”.  Help us, O God.  We fumble and feel flummoxed by trying to navigate life with these other featherless bipeds.  Our communities feel too fragile to bear the weight of all that is within us.  Help us today to breathe.  Help us today to delight in the taste of cool watermelon and ice cream on these hot, humid July days.  Help us connect to another human.  Help us listen to the trees that are a conversation we have exchanging our carbon dioxide of an exhale with the trees’ life-giving oxygen offered to us.  Help us be open to You, O God.  You are the God of this place and people and of all places and people.  We join our voices in singing, praying and holding these words today:

 

This is my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;

But other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

 

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on clover-leaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Oh, hear my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

 

A song of peace for this world and the world within me and the world between me and those who share this time and space.  Amen.