Our Memories are Short | A Prayer

We wake early … or late.

We rest easy … or restless.

We make coffee … and breakfast and plans and petitions.

Our requests before You are quaint, at best. We ask to secure and protect and retain and gather in. Grateful for privilege, and then grappling for more good and hording it.

We ask for things that start here, and now, and mostly begin with “us”, “me”, and “I”.

And somewhere and somehow, in the silence of the morning, in the pause of our prayers, we remember

The refugee in Greece.
The abused in Somalia.
The sick in Iraq.
The hungry right down the street.

The numbers are staggering, we know. The images are offensive and grotesque and all too true for our picket fence lives.

We know of their broken bodies and bloated stomachs and soiled eyes. We know not where they’ll lie down tonight, nor where they will find food today.

We can’t sit here long, God. And You know why.

Our memories are short, and we like them that way.

Because for as much as we do and work and plan and protect, here we face that which we cannot. Here, our lives are too small, our plans to short, our money insufficient (not that we were thinking of giving it anyway).

So in the brief time we pause here – in the interval between our busied moments – would You grant us these requests:

Feed the hungry.
Free the enslaved.
Defend the oppressed.
Judge the wicked.
Forgive us.

Do Your making-new act in this world of chaos and disorder.

And as You do, remember us.

As You make the orphan Your son and the hungry Your daughter would You, in Your severe mercies, remake us in Your likeness

that tomorrow

we might remember

a little longer.