broken, tuesday

Tuesday, April 1

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer: O persistent God, deliver me from assuming your mercy is gentle.  Pressure me that I may grow more human, not through the lessening of my struggles, but through the expansion of them…Deepen my hurt until I learn to share it and myself openly, and my needs honestly.  Sharpen my fears until I name them and release the power I have locked in them and they in me.  Accentuate my confusion until I shed those grandiose expectations that divert me from the small, glad gifts of the now and the here and the me.  Expose my shame where it shivers, crouched behind the curtains of propriety, until I can laugh at last through my common frailties and failures, laugh my way toward becoming whole. (Guerrillas of Grace by Ted Loder)

Daily Scripture Reading: Psalm 34:11-20

Reading for Reflection:

     Frederick Buechner once said, “To be a writer, one must be a good steward of their pain.”  I think that is true as well for those who would pray.  To be such a steward creates the possibility that others might be healed by your witness to such a thing, that others might see mercies granted to you in your suffering as evidence of the compassion of God for those who are broken.  This gift of our brokenness is often the only real gift that we can give or receive with any real honesty and with any real hope and with any real power.  We do not demonstrate our faith when we live in the light, we show our faith when we live in the dark.

     To embrace one’s brokenness, whatever it looks like, whatever has caused it, carries with it the possibility that one might come to embrace one’s healing, and then that one might come to the next step: to embrace another and their brokenness and their possibility for being healed.  To avoid one’s brokenness is to turn one’s back on the possibility that the Healer might be at work here, perhaps for you, perhaps for another.  It is to turn one’s back on another, one for whom you just might be the Christ, one for whom you might, even if just for a moment, become the Body and Blood. (Living Prayer by Robert Benson)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

                             

Closing Prayer: Thank you, O Lord, that you are near to the brokenhearted, that you save those who are crushed in spirit.  Have mercy on me, O Lord, my God.  Amen.