2 February 2025 Prayer for the Deacon, Chaplain, Pastor

If you’d like to hear Pastor Laura pray for you, you can do that right here: https://www.cgpmn.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Feb-2-2025.m4a

Your very presence in Jesus O God – it shakes everything up. It illuminates the broken bits and shows me the way toward you – toward wholeness, toward faith. You light it up with your son’s presence and I am never the same. You free me in ways I didn’t know I was bound up. You send me out to love my enemies with fervor. You show me that there is no place, no person, who is outside of your grace, your mercy, your love. You show me that even I am not outside of your grace, your mercy, your love. Oh help me to live into this today. To have the unknowable, unfathomable gift of your love burst forth within me so that it has no place to go but out toward the world you love. What a gift it is that I get to share this gift with others. Even the grumpiest of my people. Or those who seem asleep in tradition and dependent upon ritual. Help me to be a leader of your love that surprises and delights our gathering. That our gathering is like no other and that it is for your love that we even do it. Remind us that what it’s all about.

Help me to do a new thing today with those who love me best and most. Help your love to be shown to them in new ways that surprise me with how creatively you work in my own life. Show up in faithful ways to my colleagues in CGP and across southern Minnesota so that they know they are not alone, that they have friends in ministry. That you are faithful to them at all times. Even and especially in their sickness and grief. Even and especially in their in-betweenness and question of call. Even and especially in their apathy and overwhelm.

It all seems like it’s in an uproar. And yet, your love for me is enough. It is just so, well, constant. Help me to see it alive and well in my own life today, God. Let your love armor me and melt me and send me into the places where your love must be made known. And when I stumble and fall, surround me with others to show me the way. Because there is always a way with you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you, God. Amen.

Ok dear Pastor, Deacon, Chaplain  – Deep breaths. You are not alone. Don’t be afraid – God is with you.