Monday, July 2, 2012

A Prayer from the Road

Lord,
As I go to weddings, I am thrilled by the hope of completion.
Yet I find myself grappling to remember You in it.
Lord, You have done so much in me, Your healing has touched me, and so many closest to me, yet I feel a deep lack of conviction.

Lord, I feel you burn within me when I can share you, when I serve as you served, pray for healing, when you make your Word as a gong in my heard, as I worship.

But, Lord, I am so weak!  As I spend time with the family, I feel defensive.  In Greenville I feel mistrusted, doubted, watched with wary eyes. By your grace in worship and prayer and community I have learned to lay these emotional reactions aside for faith.  But I feel the hypocrite, fear the hypocrite.  How can I offer that which I must brainwash myself to believe?

Oh wash my mind!  Make me new!
Shake off my insufficiencies in faith and feeling,
and make me a new man,
of faith and fire, of revival and love deeper than my engrained insecurities.

Lord, that I would lust after greater love, instead of sex.
That I would yearn for your word.
Instead of seeking only to entertain myself with stories of so many worlds.

Lord take my heart.  I surrender my pandering
to you, my seeking after affirmation and temporary satisfactions.

Lord, take my desires and make them new.
Oh, that I could year my way-
No, I never could.
Yet such a motivation and drive.
Show me the motivating power of all-sufficient love,
that I may follow restfully.

For YOU. ARE. GOD.

Lord, I am heartbroken over the wreck on the road today.  A church bus.  And the Congo-
Lord, I see the oppressor.  In me, dear God.  And hate it and, myself for it.  And still desire to fulfill it.  My wretched flesh.  Lord, I will be freed.

Yet help me know that life with you is greater than life without sin and doubt.
Let me know You.
Life without sin, absent you, is far worse than life with sin with you.  Help me believe that deeply.


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Written, in increasing darkness (literal), on the road from Greenville to Charleston yesterday.

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