Another riff on the Lord's Prayer

I'm sick of all this philosophical mumbo-jumbo and reference to crap from my undergraduate comp-sci classes. This blog is getting to be way too much pretentious head and not enough heart. Sorry.

So instead, here's another take on the Lord's Prayer that I've been working and praying on for a few months. It started out as an attempt to train myself to be better at praying aloud spontaneously. Whenever I'm asked to lead prayer in a group, I get all tongue-tied and trip over myself trying to find the "right" words. So I decided to start with the Lord's Prayer (which I really think Jesus meant more as a model for prayer than a prayer to be literally repeated), and try to come up with a spontaneous personal expression of Christianity's most central prayer. I've done this sort of thing before.

Anyway, it started as an attempt to become more comfortable with allowing what was in my heart to come spontanously out of my mouth. Fairly quickly, it turned into an exercise in tinkering with and polishing the prayer until I thought the words were "right." This is just my personality and I might as well accept it. I still want to get better at praying aloud spontaneously. I think I just need to stop trying to make myself look small when someone says "Who wants to lead us in prayer?"

So here's the prayer I came up with. It comes from my heart via my head, and all credit goes to him who composed the original, of which this is just a heartfelt imitation.


Mike's prayer

Father God, we yearn with all our hearts for the coming of your Kingdom!

Mother God, we pray with all our hearts that we may play some part, as you've called, gifted, and sent us, in welcoming the entire world to receive and enter into your Reign.

In order that we may do this, we pray that you'll give us whatever we need today to best serve both You and our fellow creatures.

We pray that you'll free us from the anger, the guilt, and the other baggage we bring with us from our past.

We pray that you'll also free us from our fear of the future, and our own tendency to make a mess of it.

We ask all this in confidence, because we know that this Kingdom is real, and that it's Yours, and that You have the power to make it fully real on this earth.

And we pray in the name of your Son, Jesus.

Amen!