We are using prayers from the Rev. Ernest Campbell’s collection “Where Cross the Crowded Ways” each week in our Lenten Devotions.
Each week, the prayer for the next Wednesday will appear in the preceding E-pistle; it will also be posted on the church’s Facebook page on Monday or Tuesday before each Wednesday…
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We will use this prayer by the Rev. Ernest Campbell for our Lenten Devotion on Wednesday, March 18 at 7:15 pm in the church’s zoom room. Please join us.
1
We thank you, God, that praise is therapy, and gratitude the medicine of the soul. At least for the time it takes to pray, we set our minds on your mercies and give up feeling sorry for ourselves. You have blessed us with the gift of life:
surrounded us with friends;
trusted us with responsibility;
endowed us with conscience;
provide us with all things needful;
and set your love upon us.
Here within the quiet of this hour, we remember those whose sacrifice have secured the good that we enjoy parents, teachers, soldiers, artists, inventors, and crusaders; scholars, pioneers and prophets. Chiefly we ought to remember Jesus Christ: his selfless life, his voluntary death; his victorious resurrection; and his continuing power to save.
Our praises rise to you, from whom our blessings come. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
2
We embrace in our prayers today those who live with a sense of running out of what they need:
Those who are running out of time, their dreams still unfulfilled;
Those who are running out of patience, wondering how long they can endure;
Those who are running out of health, who feel their powers waning day by day;
Those who are running out of money, fighting growing costs on fixed incomes;
Those who are running out of excuses, and nearing the time for their failures;
Those who are running out of faith, having borrowed too much from other;
Those who are running out of love, finding it easier all the time to accuse and criticize and hate.
O God, who alone can keep us from falling, whose power is unbounded, where our reserves are low, fill us again, for we wish to endure all the way to the very end. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
3
We pray now for this church: its leaders and members, its ministers, its varied publics, its impact on the city and world around us.
Give us, we pray, a lively sense of mission; the ability to choose priorities; the grace to deal creatively with differences; the hope that belongs to the gospel; the faith to believe, when to doubt or disbelieve would be the easier way.
Let it be enough for us that we have seen the Christ and heard his call; lest, craving the good opinion of the world or our own comfort, we should leave undone the work entrusted to our care.
We seek; now let us find.
We ask; let it now be given to us.
We knock; O God, open the door,
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
