GraceStreet- a company of exiles

Remember Tozer's words…  “A church that can’t worship must be entertained & men who can’t lead a church to worship must provide entertainment.”

A prayer in prison

Cheryl Lawrie wrote this at www.holdthisspace.com. After a conversation with her friend Jenny who is a chaplain of a woman's prison. It was written for a worship service that has the grace to name the offense, offers the pain back to God and finds a way into forgiveness. I was struck at how closely it resembles the language of AA and the 12 steps.

God,

We have spent long enough wishing for things to be different.
We know we cannot change what we have done.

Today we pray we will learn to live with the truth of what is.

We remember today those who we have hurt
and the loved ones they have lost.

we name them now silently to you…
[light candles]

God, we know we don’t have the power to make better the things that have been destroyed

so we pray that you will do what you do
– even where it seems impossible:

that you will bring life into those places
where there is now only despair,

that you will breathe grace into hopelessness,
and peace into fear.

And we pray for ourselves:
that when we are in denial you would speak the truth;
and when we are paralysed by guilt or grief
you would speak of forgiveness
and give us the grace to live again.

It seems we are asking the impossible, God
but we know this is what you do.

Amen.

  “The journey with God does not deny our natural needs and desires, but it rearranges our priorities and nudges us constantly with the suggestion that he is calling us on, as surely as the ocean draws the rivers. Our attachments begin to look like riverbank constructions that tempt us to get out onto dry land and stay there, where it seems so comfortable, desirable and safe. But if we do, there will be no on-flowing for us, no on-growing, no progress towards the full freedom of the children of God…”

Margaret Silf