I wrote a prayer based on what I’ve heard six different elders share at church these last couple Sundays. Thought I’d share it here too.
The prompt was something like this: What epiphany have you had recently (that is, what do you feel like God has revealed to you), and what are you doing with it?
So grateful for each of these amazing humans’ insights and vulnerability.
God of our ancestors, There has never been a person, a family, a generation you have not seen. You saw their struggles and their joys, their celebrations and their desperation. We honor them, and, in so doing, we honor you. Your love encompasses them as surely as your love encompasses us. God who dwells in hard histories, You give us strength to see and not deny the past. You walk with us as we reshape narratives, fill in the gaps, remember things as they happened and not how we wish they were, or what we were taught to believe. God of the advocates, Thank you for the gift of knowing that we were already praying, even when we didn’t know it. You have been in every plea for justice, every act of care for another human being, everything we did to make sure someone knew they had value and were not forgotten. Help us move toward justice, love, and peace, trusting you are near even when we don’t feel you. God who kicks down doors, Give us courage to face our places of privilege. Give us the nerve to push for equity. Open the doors that need to be opened and tear down the doors that need to be torn down. Invite us to make good trouble with you. God who is near to the lonely, Help us accept our loneliness and find you, somehow, in the murky midst of it. When friends don’t know how to care for us, you are with us, still. When comforting words fall flat in the face of our grief, and well-intentioned platitudes just make us angry, you make room for us to yell and cry and grieve. Our full humanity is not too much for you. God who invites us to lie down in green pastures, You are not our boss. You do not buy into capitalism’s lies that say we must always be working, always producing, worth only as much as we produce and consume. You are the God who rests. You are the God who invites us to rest. Overturn tables set with the greed of a few to the detriment of all. Break the connection between money and value. Restore our sleep, our bodies, our minds, our health, our courage to resist these systems that were not built for us. God who believes in us, Remind us that there is more to us than we might know, more than others might recognize. Sing over us your songs of worth, precious value, wisdom, courage to be exactly who you made us to be. You created us as you wanted us to be. Let no one tell us otherwise. Fill us with hope for a future we can’t quite yet imagine. May our dreams move in your directions. Help us remember that each one of us is necessary. God whose star the magi followed, Reveal yourself to us: your broad inclusivity, your redeeming power, your advocacy, your table-turning justice, your tender presence in our darkest times, your rest, your restoration, your kindness, the glory of your creation in us and around us. Reveal among us the different kind of community you build. Help us go a different way from the well-trod violent paths so easily available to us. Make peace in, among, and through us. Amen.