Daily Prayer

Consumed with gloom and doom from the news of the morning, I thought I’d tune in to PoliNation and this is what I find.

Thanks, chrissy.

From the personal to the planetary, every prayer is needed. Every one I know is hurting or hurt, one way or another. I can never pray for the restoration of health to my beloved or strength for our family spirit, without thinking of all the sick, and all the wounded families, and our sick and wounded world, even the troubled family of the believers in Our Father.

At least, such universalizing puts the personal in perspective, but it seems an awfully hard duty of prayer, because I’m a poor, intermittant, frantic kind of pray-er, and I get pretty selfish about Milady’s health and my own distraught family’s circumstances. Faithless and infantile, I whine more than pray, Jesus why can’t you do what we know you can, for your children here, your world here? If our faith is what we need, grace us with more unencumbered living faith. Or can’t we pray for that if we don’t have enough faith in the first place? Ack! Spiritual Catch-22s. Hello? Hello? (Links to an old cartoon of mine.)

Then there are moments of sobriety when it does occur to me that it all works out to the will of our Father, and my job is not to tell God how to run things but to submit utterly to that Will. Such moments pass. Then I’m like Jimmy Stewart in Wonderful Life, griping that a sock on the puss was the answer to my prayer and do you have eight thousand bucks, angel?

Shine upon us, Spirit, that we may better have our Father and the Son shine through us.