groaning, monday

Monday, December 8

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

         

Opening Prayer: To the God who pursues.  Our world is groaning around me and my heart groans with it.  So many tears and questions, so many stillborn children, so much cancer and divorce, so many orphans and so much poverty.  Closing my eyes doesn’t make the wailing stop; doesn’t turn the grief into joy.  I hear your Spirit groaning with me, taking the cry of my heart to your throne.  Hear our groans.  Have mercy on us. (A Heart Exposed by Steven James)

Scripture Reading for the Day: 2 Corinthians 5:1-10

Reading for Reflection:

 

     Something deep within our existence creates a restlessness for God, yet we live and move and work in a culture of technology, efficiency, and the tyranny of the literal.  The hunger for holiness coexists uneasily with the practical atheism of our way of life.  Still, the deepest language of the Christian biblical tradition claims that the created world itself already reflects the goodness of God but also groans in travail for sanctification and recreation.  The time and place where these tensions intersect is the gathered church at worship. (Sanctifying Time, Place and People by Don Saliers, The Weavings Reader)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself    

                     

Closing Prayer:

On tiptoe we stand, Lord Jesus
eagerly awaiting
your full revelation
always expecting you
to come some more.

Our hands and hearts
are open to your grace.
Our lives still waiting for
the fullness of your presence.
We are those who have been promised
a Kingdom, and we can never forget
Yet we have a foot in both worlds
and so we stumble.

But still we stand
on tiptoe
Owning our kingdom-loving hearts
and our earth-eyes
We lean forward
And hope.
                      ~Macrina Wiederkehr