2022-12-28 A Prayer: Something New

O Lord, see that something new is here; help us to wait and to take our difficulties in stride, patient as we pray through the adoption of this new thing by higher powers that be. We pray for Your new thing to break the mold, to claim more than we perhaps are willing to concede: that the foundations change, that it is religion itself that You came to upset. So help us recover the plight You went through in Your garden of Gethsemane, the plight You went through on Your Cross. We find it easy to dismiss what You did, but in truth You became center-stage, and thus today we need no new picture of You, but rather peace and willingness to go the way You went. Use us. Make malleable our proud claims. Make us servant to a Spirit come down to us Today, in Your Scriptures, in Your testimonies, in the ways Your Spirit is active and intervening in our world today. Help us be useful to others.

Help us to pray for those whom we forget to pray for. Help us with basic proof that You are sufficient; we can be the hands and feet of a Person already Real, already Questioned, already Sacrificed. Help us with those who dismiss our prayers, to pray for them in particular. To pray in particular for the less fashionable people “out there”, the concern for those just plugging away, or entrenched in their doubts. For doubts are the lack of faith. Doubts are meant to be recast as belief. They are meant to be challenged.

We pray all this in Your Name, Amen.