Sunday, April 25, 2010
Offered by Joyce Shin, Associate Pastor

In you, Lord, the world began and will end. All of creation is known by you. No life lies beyond your reach, and no one is left out of your love. You are the source of life and love.

So open our mouths, Lord, that we may drink in your life-giving love. Do not let us be close-mouthed, suspicious of your goodness and reluctant to taste of it. Do not let us be stingy to ourselves. For your love is abundant and intended for our delight.

If it is our hearts that are hard, Lord, then make them tender. Turn them into the springs of life and love that you created them to be, resuscitating us to live for you and all for whom you care.

Make us receptive, Lord, of you. Open us to your goodness and your graciousness, so that we might relax our all-too-tight grip on things to control and loosen our fear of those things beyond our power. The world is great, Lord, and you have made us able to care for it, not to control it.

Forgive us, Lord, for failing in so many ways to care for creation. We have been short-sighted, putting consumption, comfort, ease, and speed first in the way we live our lives, in the way we treat each other and the earth. Slow us down, Lord, and straighten us out, so that we might set our eyes on the horizon and there see the future you so desire for us.

You have planned a future, we know, for the world’s welfare: a future in which people know neither hunger nor thirst; a future in which our children flourish and our elders are honored; a future in which everyone has a home so that all can show hospitality; a future in which all peoples, learning to forgive each other so that they might live together, become a new creation.

Lord, put us to work for the welfare of the world. Fill our lives with your love that we may count nothing too small to do for you, nothing too much to give, and nothing too hard to bear.

In the name of your Son Jesus Christ, we pray these things and the prayer he taught his disciples to say: Our Father . . .

Prayer © Fourth Presbyterian Church