‘You’ beyond our ‘weary selves’

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“You” beyond Our

“Weary Selves”

Walter Brueggemann

Cincinnati, Ohio

You God, Lord and Sovereign,

you God, lover and partner.

You are God of all our possibilities.

You preside over all our comings and goings,

all our wealth and all our poverty,

all our sickness and all our health,

all our despair and all our hope,

all our living and all our dying.

And we are grateful.

You are God of all our impossibilities.

You have presided over the emancipations

and healings of our mothers and fathers;

you have presided over the wondrous transformations in our

own lives. You have and will preside over those parts of our lives that we imagine to be closed. And we are grateful.

So be your true self, enacting the things impossible for us, that we might yet be whole among the blind who see and the dead who are raised; that we may yet witness your will for peace, your vision for justice, your vetoing all our killing fields.

At the outset of this day, we place our lives in your strong hands. Before the end of this day, do newness among us in the very places where we are tired in fear, we are exhausted in guilt, we are spent in anxiety.

Make all things new, we pray in the new-making name of Jesus.

Used by permission: Prayers for a Privileged People, Walter Brueggemann, Abingdon Press, 2008.

Journal for Preachers