Guiding Prayer for Today
As our week is to be focused on reciting the Lord's Prayer three times each day, take a moment before reading on to quiet your heart, quiet your mind, your thoughts, you body. As the stillness and quiet begins to take over your senses, slowly begin to recite this paraphrase of the prayer Christ taught us to pray...
Our Father, who is in heaven, your name is holy.
May your kingdom come here on earth
as it already has come in heaven.
Give us today all we need.
And help us to forgive others as you forgave us.
Help us not to fall to temptation,
but deliver us into righteousness.
For everything on earth, under the earth,
and above the earth are yours...
all glory, all honor, all power forever and ever.
Amen.Myself in Truth
Nurtured and Nurturing
In giving up, may we gain a new understanding of your sacrifice Jesus. May we remember that you gave everything so that we might be called children of God and be claimed as yours eternally. Amen From Galatians 3:26
The Gathered
We are no longer strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. Remind us today that we are not alone in the journey. Amen From Ephesians 2:19
Challenge
This week, order your day around prayer. Choose three times a day, something close to breakfast/lunch/dinner and pray the Lord’s Prayer knowing that your fellow believers are lifting up the same prayer with you.
Order Up
Ordering our days. What exactly does that mean? Can we put order in our days? I think we attempt to through organization by calendars and notes and bulletins and phone alerts but that is organization, not ordering. Ordering our days is something completely different. Organization is setting things in logical and physical order; ordering our days is setting Christ as first priority and allowing time with him to guide our daily routine.
Meals are often what we organize our time around. Meals can give us a sense of orderliness in our day and provide a skeleton for our daily routine. For some people, no matter where they are in the world, if they have their mealtime structure, they can feel that their day is not spinning out of control. Even prisoners in complete isolation can gain some sense of sanity from the content of their meals because eggs mean breakfast, bologna means lunch and soup means dinner. Even if they literally have no window, no idea of time, meals give them a window to the world outside.
The first time I went to South Africa, I went with my seminary class. We had been studying the church and apartheid for a semester, and were going to live with families who had been victims of apartheid, which was legalized discrimination based on race. When America was in the beginning stages of our civil rights movement, South Africa was really starting to set the system of Apartheid in order.
Our class took a trip to the District 6 Museum. District Six was named the Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town in 1867. Originally established as a mixed community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, laborers and immigrants, District Six was a vibrant center with close links to the city and the port. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the process of removals and marginalization had begun.
In 1966 it was declared a white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950, and by 1982, the life of the community was over. 60 000 people were forcibly removed to barren outlying areas aptly known as the Cape Flats, and their houses in District Six were flattened by bulldozers.
The museum was a collection of stories and pictures of the displaced. Rooms of homes had been recreated and the stories on each wall helped the reader to envision what a vibrant, closely knit community it was and what a devastating loss to the families, communities and country it’s removal had been. I was completely enveloped in the stories of these families, artists, and people when suddenly our teacher told us it was time to go. It had only been an hour! Why were we leaving so soon? Most of us would never have the chance to see this museum and hear these stories again!
The answer: People were hungry. They were in another country and yet they were ordering their days around meals at McDonald’s rather than once-in-a-lifetime experiences. They were missing the good stuff in exchange for a mediocre meal that they could have in America anytime. I was completely put out with them, but as I reflected on the situation that night, I realized that for some people, being out of the country, away from family and living with strangers had thrown their sense of balance and normalcy completely off. They felt out of control of their own lives. Meals and meal times were the one thing that they could count on to be the same. A McDonald’s cheeseburger is going to be the same anywhere you go, you can count on it.
We missed so much by ordering our day around our meals. It makes me wonder how much we miss on a daily basis…how many blessings and experiences do we forfeit when we neglect to order our day around time with God? This week, as we seek to reorder our days, may we keep our eyes open to the blessings and experiences that God has in store for us.
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