“O children of God, casting your cares upon his strong shoulders now surrender your own agendas for this day, and instead be led by the working of his Spirit. Open our eyes and our hearts, O Lord, to your words and truth.“ - Every Moment Holy
Slow down to hear his voice
I was reminded today how we as a society desperately need to slow down, to not get lost in the busy. For when we slow down, when we are still, those are the moments that God will move. He moves even in our busy but it’s in our busy that we do not see or hear him.
Take each morning or carve out a time in your day to be quiet before the Lord. Those times are more precious than you can imagine. Even if you don’t hear him, it’s in those moments that you are primed to hear from him throughout the day.
#bestill
Morning prayer
An excerpt for Every Moment Holy: the Hours of Daybreak. A book of prayers.
“We open our hearts anew to you this morning, O Lord, that the love of the Father and the life of Christ and the breath of the Spirit would quicken within us a greater affection for your ways. Work your will in is, Lord Christ.”
We Weep Without Knowing Why
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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