O God of Grace,
You are so good to us.
We tend to get in our own way.
To look at our lives
and think, “I can work with this.”

For those times when we’ve
elbowed You out of the way,
closed our ears to Your voice,
looked at the world with our eyes
instead of Yours:
Forgive us.

Let us seek and find You
in the small-big of the world we inhabit.
To let go of both our idea of control
and our passivity.
That we may act in Your world
as You act.

Lord, in Your mercy, hear our prayer.

You hear us calling,
You hear us calling,
Abba Father

God, Our Refuge,
we seek Your loving arms,
the only true calm
amidst our chaos.

And yet,
in the tangible stuff of this earth,
we see pain and destruction,
ruin and devastation.
Wildfires in the west,
Gunfire across the land,
Explosive fire in Syria.

We see this and echo the psalmist.
We cry that You would uphold
all who are falling.
We lament while we trust,
We weep while we wait.
We believe You are near,
for where else can we go?

Lord, in Your mercy, hear our prayer.

You hear us calling,
You hear us calling,
Abba Father

God of the Small,
we are so tempted by the Big.
“Go big or go home” is our mantra,
but let us see it as a choice
and choose to go Home to You.

Let us not become swayed
by the Enormous, by the Next Big Thing.
Instead, let this body find You in the small.
You love to work Unmistakably Big,
but You also love to work
in the Atomically Small.
In a handful of loaves.
In a couple of fish.
In each and every one of us.
We humbly offer our Smallness to You
So that You may magnify it
as only You can.
And as we do so,
we find our home in You.

All this we ask through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Lord have mercy,
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy,
Christ have mercy.