Essential Prayer (Lisa)

Dear Lord,

Make me the essential heart of You this day. Help me be silent in the presence of You, You who resides in my friends and neighbors. Help me be silent to truly listen to all others with compassion and not speed ahead with a satisfying answer for everything. Guide me to listen deeply with the burning heart of Jesus first.

If speaking is necessary, shape my mouth to form the essential words of Your truth, love and beauty. Spill Your Grace on my tongue when I miss the mark, but help me say what is essential. Do not let those words go unspoken in me. Give me the courage to give voice to You in whatever name that is. Help me consider each word, for its weightiness, worthiness, essentialness. O Lord, I am trying.

Help my hands and feet today, to love You well by loving others as You ask Lord. May all my acts today be deeply thoughtful and not frivolous or merely self-fulfilling. If my hands can only do ONE THING today, make it essential. Help me walk this day, sifting through what is secondary to get to the granular necessary. Help me feel I have done enough but meet me where I fall because I surely will, even as I try, I will fail and fall again, and again but open my eyes to the gift of your ever-present grace so that I might stand to grow some more.

Lord, guide me to not just pray about what is essential, but to see it there and there, and here and there, in this and that, and that and even that, to know You, in the fails and losses and disappointments and confusion. Help me find the ESSENTIAL truth of YOU in the light but also in the darker shadowy places I find in myself today. Help me feel YOU in the very matter of the essential matter.

You exist in it all and we are all one in YOU. If you deemed it essential enough to create it, then there must be some truth and beauty and love in it. Help me sift it out and find that YOU = ESSENTIAL.

Help me feel essential to You Lord. Help me feel Your pressing, burning, urgent Love. Thank you for blessing my soul Lord with this thought and for giving me a friend to share it with.

Amen