20233-02-21 A Prayer: A Leading Person

O Lord, reason and timelines, causes and effects, stages of life; we ask sometimes if anything has changed. Because of a long list of deductions we’ve made, always inhibited in some regard lest we be accused in our denuded plain speech, and yet hating the artifice and the tangential labors. Help us to be forgiving, to sympathize but not violate each other’s wishes, to be patient to ask if “anything has changed”.

For we arrive at a logical impasse: such-and-so was based on reasoning that by now may have changed! And in the chaos, we forget to revisit and revise. Accused, we simply point out that perhaps all is healed because the friend we are avoiding has made their home elsewhere; and that “moving out of the neighborhood” should be accompanied with an invitation ourselves to return. No longer to be in the way. No longer to steal the attention. No longer to have “ulterior motives”. O Lord, what they accuse us of is heartbreaking; we are good folk! Help us to feel that and no longer to walk on eggshells.

See this a simple prayer to get out of our heads and practical and forgiving others for not seeing the context for plain statements. Help us to learn each other’s contexts, the better to understand their decrees, or their simple conversation. Help us in all things to be unashamed of our fast or our gospel, meeting others possessed of a different game plan, but yes recognizing that amidst vast differences there can be much fruit and cause to thank You for putting a leading woman or leading man in our lives.

We pray all this in Your Name, Amen.