Prayer Challenge: Tuesday Morning, Week 2

       Welcome to week 2 of the prayer challenge!  If you missed the start, I'm challenging you to 14 weeks of using the lectionary's Prayers of Thanksgiving and Intercession.  There are lots of prayers scattered throughout the lectionary (apple/android), and all are wonderful for getting you out of a prayer rut.  The Prayers of Thanksgiving and Intercession have been particularly helpful for getting me out of my usual "I need, I need!" prayers.    

If you're just now joining us - welcome! Start where you are.  Each week we'll dissect one of the prayers to help us pray more intentionally.  Here goes...

 

Prayer Challenge: Monday Morning

Praying Commonly: Take the Challenge

lec·tion·ar·y

ˈlekSHəˌnerē/

noun

1. a list or book of portions of the Bible appointed to be read at a church service.

Westside Christian Fellowship began using the Presbyterian lectionary several years ago when PastorK wanted to get us all on the same page reading scripture together.  Are we Presbyterian?  Nope.  He admits he chose almost at random, probably because he had the Presbyterian Book of Common Prayer on his shelf.  Either way, it's been a few years.  We started out listing all the readings on our website and then the Presbyterians came out with this handy app (iOS/android) that thankfully ended that feat.  (Shout out to Bob Marshall who came into the office every week to type out those readings.)

If you aren't familiar with a lectionary (I wasn't), it's simply a Bible reading schedule including some repeated phrases to give it form and written prayers.  After using it for a few years, I have a confession...my prayer life has changed, and I love it.

Flash back to teen years:

As a kid I LOVED alone time, was uber passionate about EVERYTHING, and could daydream my way through the longest summer day with the best of them.  I'd sit on the carpet in my room looking out the window (Because then you couldn't see the other houses and therefore it was easier to imagine I was an innkeeper in the middle ages taking a break between another round of bread and ale for my guests.  Duh.) and fill notebooks with my prayers to God.  I'd ramble.  I'd dream.  In those black and white composition notebooks I'd pour out my heart.

Christ Easters In Us w/ Meredith Ainley

“Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.” This is one of the closing lines to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” I was reminded of this poem last year in light of the tragedy in the Yellow Sea in South Korea. The Sewol ferry, heading to a popular holiday island, capsized while carrying 476 people around this time last year, killing 304 people. Most of the 172 survivors were rescued by local fishing boats and other commercial vessels that beat the South Korean coast guard to the scene by half an hour. Many of the passengers were students and teachers from a high school near Seoul on a field trip. Dozens of divers searched in vain in the frigid, murky waters, holding on to the hope that they might find someone still alive inside the sunken ferry.

Hopkins’ poem was written in 1918 in memory of another ship that sank.  That emigrant ship, the Deutschland, had set out from Germany for New York but ran aground on a shoal 25 miles off the coast of England in a snowstorm on December 6, 1875. Waves crushed the ship and no one answered the signals for help until much later. Ultimately, it was a lazy rescue effort, and some even descended upon the scene merely for personal gain, taking anything of value off the dead bodies.