I was asked by a few people for a copy of this prayer I shared on Sunday. It was inspired by the opening chapters of Almost Christian by Kenda Creasy Dean (which by the way is a great book, but seems a bit redundant through the opening sections).
As we breathe in the breath of life we become aware that we are dependent upon you Spirit of life. We cannot make it on our own; we cannot do this thing called life on our own. If it were not for you we could not even breathe. We are completely dependant upon your grace in our lives but the fact of the matter is, most of the time we think we can do just fine without you.
We are caught up in a great deception and lie. We live our lives saying all the “Christian” things and being “nice” to people all the while believing we have submitted ourselves to your Will of sacrifice and de-centered ourselves. It is embarrassing to even admit it in these quite moments that we live with the expectation that you a butler waiting on us to snap our fingers so as to meet an immediate desire we have. It is amazing that even in our arrogance and refusal to change our life to reflect Your desire and mission, you still love us. You still traverse time and space, life and death in order to enter into our lives, defrost our hearts and call us to sacrificial love. Why do you do it? Why do you have compassion for a people who constantly push you away and treat you like a parlor trick? In this very moment, in our collective embarrassment and awareness of our shame, please forgive us. Transform our minds to the point where our desires are your desires, transform our heart so that what you have compassion for we too would have compassion for.
You are a God of great compassion not only in dealing with us individually but with the entire world. While we are blaming other people for the problems of the world, you have compassion for them. While we are busy looking for a way to make ourselves look good, through Jesus Christ you died for the very people we demonize. Your demands of compassion are high and your grace calls us to a greater love than we embody at this time, but we seek to move toward being made perfect in love. For being perfect in love we are transformed to embody your Love and Grace; for it is the embodiment of Grace that we follow as we join our voices with the Great Cloud of Witnesses, the Saints of the Church past and present in the unending prayer which Jesus taught all his disciples to pray saying: Our Father...