A Lenten Prayer by Bill Wallof
Father God, we praise you for your son Jesus Christ.
-We thank you for the kindness and wisdom we see in his life as he dwelt amongst us.
-We thank you for his humility and how he did not play to the favor of the crowd or appeal to the use of the spectacular.
-For his willingness to drink from the cup of the suffering servant.
-For his courage and fortitude to face physical pain, humiliation and loneliness.
In this Lenten season, hold him up as a mirror for us that we might see how far away we are from him.
Today we pray for our nation and the world. Help us as a church and a people to win the hard peace for a world so torn by hatred and revenge. Forgive your children’s warring madness.
We pray for our leaders, our president and his advisors. Give them wisdom and humility as they face decisions of complexity that impact everyone. Deliver us as a nation from arrogance that can come with power. Make us your servants that we may find solutions for the suffering of poverty and cruelty of oppression we see in places like Haiti and Africa. Teach us how to defend this nation without resorting to the same evil we so detest in others.
We pray for the welfare of your church in this time. Use her to boldly proclaim the truth we find about life in Jesus Christ. Give her effective words to proclaim the gospel of life to peoples trapped by the darkness of death. Forgive her with the preoccupation with the trivial and for any smallness of vision given the task at hand.
In a world of economic complexity, we pray for those who are unemployed by no choice of their own or those whose identity is closely tied to work lost; whose plans and dreams have been sidetracked if not crushed by their lack of financial resources.
Finally we pray for those who face illness of mind and body. Use us to be agents of your healing and your peace in our lives. Sustain us all with the presence of your Spirit.
And may the Good News that Easter brings never be trivialized by our failure to be struck by awe in what you have done for this world in the resurrection. Enable the peoples of the earth to choose the abundant life you intended for your creation.
We make our prayer in the name of Jesus who taught us how to approach you saying… Our Father….
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (I Corinthians 13:12)