2023-01-27 A Prayer: Near Fruits
O Lord, unbashful we see with alliances true and false; unashamed we reckon amidst points of disagreement, a special world You have outfitted for us Your people, and the banal, the freeloading, the corrupt or rotten fruit, fruit of ill decisions and rampant sins past, in this You strengthen and encourage us to abide through, to stay near in defiance of a status quo that lacks discernment or teeth. In defiance of plain errors in judgment and easy sins that wrecked others: greed, fault-finding, betrayal, irreverence. See holy Man nonetheless on a slippery slope.
Grant radical peace to see and outfit ourselves minus any guilt-trip or forced shame; we are unashamed to be those spiritually homeless (even though having churches stand tall in our communities) and therefore reckoning on a judgment that is quite precise: one kind of freeloader, yes; another kind, no. We are no longer freeloaders but beggars, wandering souls granted a Kingly audience with You. We are no longer pacific, that is, no longer calm just to abide near to one another; we acknowledge plain differences and sins, that call for us to be brave and diligent, to allow some to go the way of judgment as we nonetheless, unproud, not boastful, mend our nets and labor in our vineyards, as Your kind of people. In confidence. In need. In determination, and sorrow over, but not gloating over, those falling away.
Help us to turn our greatest sorrows or pains into a sense of fittedness and calling unto Your courts. Help us when we wish things were otherwise, to give glory to Father in Heaven: these, our trials, we wouldn’t wish upon anyone even if they gave pathway to Your courts and to holiness; yet we dare to believe just because we had no alternative. We dare to give thanks. We dare to expunge the grinning guilty ones, who must repent or be lost unto the great haste and the great sorting underway. See that we do not grow proud, but know and pray for a kind of sorting that is unworldly and greater than any act or fiat or wisdom of Man.
We pray all this in Your Name, Amen.