A Prayer
Good morning, Lord. Thanks you for another lovely start to a new day. I find such pleasure in being near you. Why do I so often wander away from you and for such long periods? Why do I find it so hard to return once I’ve wandered off?
I do feel so much more at peace within myself when I’m in closer touch with you. My frantic anxieties, my confusion, and my impulsiveness seem so much less when I am in closer communion with you. You settle me. You orient me. You focus me. I am most fully myself when I am most fully with you.
Lord of heaven and earth, it is good and necessary for me to affirm over and over that you are sovereign in everything. Nothing is over you. You are not obliged to bow to anything or anyone. Your will is constrained by nothing outside of yourself.
My will is constrained by so many things. I am weak, and many of the forces, natural and otherwise, are far stronger than I am. Many of the circumstances of my life I cannot change. My understanding is limited. I cannot plumb the depths of the complexities of my life. My wisdom in itself is no match for the fog and tangle where I live my life.
That is why I have to depend on you. That is why I have to lay my life and my work out on the table of prayer and ask you to show me the way and make me able to follow it. I pray to live, to serve, to bear fruit.
© 2009 Gary A. Chorpenning
Gary Chorpenning's Notebooks 
I need to quiet myself. Pray more. I need to make more time to listen. I need to stay closer to Him by reading His word more than others’ words about Him.
I like your picture. Its meaning for me –
Dear Lord, my world is so cold when I am away from You. I feel like I’m barely hanging on. It’s so easy for life to get turned up-side down and in side out when I stay hidden and lost inside myself. Send Your rays to warm my heart. Bring me closer to You. I don’t tolerate the cold very well. I need to stay where it is warm.
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Wow, Pastor Gary, you reached into my mind and drew out my soul’s dilemma. This is good and bad. Good, because “misery loves company” as they say, and it’s comforting to know other humans go through the same “fog and tangle” I find myself traversing frequently. Bad, because people like you and Heather and some others at various times in my life have always seemed to be so filled with God’s Spirit that I look to you and them to re-focus my faith journey when it gets snarled, knowing you are already pointed in the right direction. Yet you admit to the fog and tangle (I love that phrase, can you tell?) – scary, to find that God’s best disciples have perfectly human weaknesses like everyone else, and reassuring, to know we’re all on the same path, struggling together. Know, for a fact, that you have born fruit in my growing faith. Thank you for sharing your thoughts – keep them coming!!!
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Sounds a lot like my prayers, except much more eloquint!
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