2022-12-22 A Prayer: Following in the Footsteps

O Lord, we try and are merely creatures of our experiences, lacking in confidence, discouraged, despondent. We make our hearts vulnerable by caution and ill-advised quiet. So equip us to be force and substance of a breath of fresh air, Your kindness, Your mutual care for one another, Your legitimacy. We feel legitimate when, no longer cowed, we point to a road less taken. We point to a gospel less adopted. We advocate for heart-change, because it is all that made our own walk tenable. Our walk is viable because we gave all to You, and not everyone is at that point. So grant us to murmur through social events of a wistful and future Hope. Grant us to kneel down and discover the pain, the unspoken vulnerability or gentleness. Grant us not to serve out of personal ambition but because it is how and where You have equipped us with experience and with nurture.

See how a few words can change the spirit in the air. See how we can be offensive to sin but amenable to goodness. See us really seeking no pleasantries and half-baked efforts, but genuine effort to find the soul of this our peer. See us no longer lazy nor accommodating of false security, but ministering out of necessity and through the hurt. See that we have radars for trauma and pain, for disagreement, and help us to be One in our hope. Help us in all things to remember the more dire straits, and not to fuss over half-way healing but rather to join hands in Hope and to wear our heart on our sleeve.

For it is strange the way You work in this life. We feel now emboldened and heartened, knowing in a better world those words would have been spoken; that affinity would have been created between brother and sister in the faith. That pat on the back or “Good job!” would have carried the day, a day where we are simply not greater than the sum of our parts and of our experiences. So grant us always to be invulnerable because our doctrine includes hardships; we expect them, we rejoice in them, we flip all naysaying into compliment: there was a time when they did likewise to You. So we can follow in those footsteps.

We pray all this in Your Name, Amen.