Hurry and Holiness | A Prayer

Our thoughts are hurried, our attention is short.

Our routines are cemented and set, and we play along.

We occupy ourselves with things of high import, believing You to be pleased with our volume of goodness, with our busied morality.

But we lay our heads down to sleep wishing we knew more of Your pleasure, and wondering just why we haven’t done enough to evoke Your delight.

So we wake with hurried eagerness, supplying to our day more good things, cramming all the morality we can name into the blank spaces of our day.

But we lay our heads down to sleep and wonder why You seem so absent, why You seem displeased, why You haven’t joined us in our working worship.

Is it not enough? Is it not right? Did we miss the mark?

And we wake again to the liturgies our preoccupation, to the habits of our hurry, and in the clarity of morning we realize

we miss You.

Morning calls to memory days of delight and hours of adoration.

We remember the sweet melody of praise that poured from our young lips,

and the heart fit to burst with desire to join You in Your work.

And we look at the work of our hands and notice how unlike Yours it is:

It is hurried.

It is frantic.

It is devoid of peace.

It is without hope.

So in the sobriety of morning, we turn our commitments to You.

We love them, we will admit. Our work has worked its way into our hearts, lodged there, and refuses to be moved.

But we open our hands to You and ask that in Your way of making all things new, would You start with us.

Would You re-work us, until our work is spilling over with Your delight, filled to the brim with Your pleasure.

And we will sit here – unhurried, un-working – until You call us to Your side to join You in Your commission.

Amen.