PRAYER in downtown

Your life ebbing away, like the tide that’s heading out, but this time never to return? You been stumbling about in the dark, no relief, or even hope of help, in sight? Are you approaching death, maybe even entertaining a dim desire way back there that it might come all of its own accord? Sick and tired of the peaks and valleys, a ride that has left you reeling and staggering about like one drunk puppet?

Often these distress-filled conditions seem to seep into our psyche, other times we’re arrogantly going after trouble. Whatever it’s all about, we’ve gotten ourselves into a gloomy place, trouble that we can’t pull ourselves out of.

We “good Christian men and women” don’t care to share any of these conditions with each other, many we even (foolishly) think we can keep from God, who cares for us all, who is waiting patiently with his tender love for our return. Return, not in the sense of an end to such conditions as any of these, but a return to faithfulness, to trust and hope in Him alone. Go ahead, cry out! And then, again. Cry out! Help me, Lord, for I am once again lost and forlorn. I have let my condition in this world once again overshadow my hope in you. I’ve caved in to the pressures of my time and place—pressures big or pressures small.

That’s when we need prayer big time–at the times when it’s so hard to put some words together to the Lord. “Seek me and live,” He tells us through Amos. He’s eagerly waiting to lead us back, on one of those famous straight highways through the desert into the stress-free lands he’s carved out for us.

Thanks be to God for His almighty deeds. Let us praise his holy name for rescuing us from ruin, for providing us land in which we can be a family that thrives, basking in his eternal love for us.

Let us pray. Come, Lord Jesus. Come and carry us back into your arms. Forgive us our relentless pursuit of life without you. Glory be to You–to You alone, who has provided for us always through that never-ending tender mercy and love that is beyond our understanding. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen