With a heavy heart this morning reflecting on the state of our nation, I needed help this morning in prayer and devotion so I turned to “Every Moment Holy.” I took a portion of the prayer and wrote it for you below.
We have wept so often.
And we will weep again.
And yet, there is somewhere in our tears
a hope still kept.
We feel it in this darkness,
Like a tiny flame,
When we are told
Jesus also wept.
You wept.
So moved by the pain of this crushed creation,
you, O Lord, heaved with the grief of it,
drinking the anguish like water and sweating it
out of your skin like blood
Is it possible that you-in your sadness
over Lazarus, in your grieving for
Jerusalem, in your sorrow in the garden-
is it possible that you have sanctified
our weeping too?
For the grief of God is no small thing,
and the weeping of God is not without effect.
The tears of Jesus preceded
a resurrection of the dead.
O Spirit of God,
is it then possible
that our tears might also be
a kind of intercession?
That we, your children, in our groaning
with the sadness of creation, could
be joining in some burdened work
of coming restoration? Is it possible
that when w weep and don’t know why,
it is because the curse has ranged
so far, so wide? That we weep at that
which breaks your heart, because it
has also broken ours-sometimes so deeply
that we cannot explain our weeping,
even to ourselves?
If that is true,
then let such weeping be received, O Lord,
as an intercession newly forged of holy sorrow.
Then let our tears anoint these broken things,
and let our grief be as their consecration-
a preparation for their promised
redemption, our sorrow sealing them
for that day when you will take
the ache of all creation,
and turn it inside-out,
like the shedding of
an old gardener’s glove.
O Lord, if it pleases you,
when your children weep
and don’t know why,
yet use our tears
to baptize what you love.
Amen.
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