2022-11-08 A Prayer: Mission Beckoning

O Lord, so feed us; see us rapt with a panoply of experience; normative work that is all-fulfilling; we long thus to be today inspired and in focused participation in Your work, in Your Spirit. We long for some excitement to circumvent plainly all hangups and doubts, all stasis, all familiarity. For we are middle-of-the-road sometimes, neither all in nor quite absent the faith.

By “all in”, let us mean the participation in just exciting and coherent Cause; see us long for that apt conversation with a potential fellow-traveler, or that real certainty that You are real, as real as any Encounter or Enrapturing commitment. All is on the line, it is the end times of our horrific ennui and lazy sufficiency. We try to be sufficient rather than to be enthusiastic. We need relief from the paused joy; we long for that norm called Inspiration. See us who know those beckoning workplaces past, and make real and concrete, substantive, all we do in unity with Your people this day.

Forgive us any ambition or pride of purpose; we ask not because of pride nor of ambition, but because we know ourselves all too well, and minus that Norm we are languishing. We cannot be lukewarm. We know You call us in sincerity to great things; we know You call us to join in heavenly Cause. We know all these things because of the substantive, concrete, theoretical Meeting Place. We meet Your goodness. We meet, and are given pause. We meet, and are suddenly apt for the fight, suddenly kosher to be inducted, suddenly we belong and all of a sudden we are just on a razor’s edge, twixt tearing up in joy and in warm thoughts, or fearing the old ghosts of unfruitful time elapsing, of age or doubt or inability to join this world to Your Eternity.

In truth, your eternity begins in such joyous, remarkable, astonishing and beckoning work. So calm us and thrill us, delight us, this day, to travel the righteous paths passed down through the generations. We are capable of such all-on involvement. We know we are, and ask only that the crisis this day be enough to call each of us to Rise up and put hand to plow, ear to the company, heart both remade and also remaking, content but also busy.

We pray all this in Your Name, Amen.