Pastoral Prayer for August 28, 2022

Please allow the words of this prayer to become your own personal words.

Lord Jesus,

You were and are the human face of God.

You know what it’s like to walk down a road.

You know what it’s like to be hungry.

To want things you can’t have.

To injure yourself, feel pain, and have to wait for healing.

To miss someone.

To suffer great loss, with nothing but time and prayer to heal the ache.

You know what it’s like to see the world as a child, as a teenager,

as an adult.

Help me to remember this.

There’s nothing I’m going through that you don’t understand.

I don’t have any fears or hopes or pains that you can’t imagine.

You’ve been there, because you’ve been here, with us, on this earth,

in all its beauty and all its brokenness.

Your responses to life’s different challenges give us the clues we need

to walk in your shoes, to become more and more like you.

This is the way for us to gradually become the salt and light for the world

that you call us and empower us to become.

Thank you, Lord Jesus, for dwelling among us then, and living with us still.

Amen.