“Gather Me Now”
– Ponderings:
I must have missed the “memo” last night, because at around 1:30 this morning the “girls” and I were awakened by thunder, lightning, and rain. We need the rain so I’m not complaining, but one of my dogs did not appreciate all the racket. She was awake and so I was awake. Now she’s sleeping and I’m having a cup of coffee and reading another prayer by Ted Loder. It’s called “Gather Me Now.”
O God, gather me now
to be with you as you are with me.
Soothe my tiredness;
quiet my fretfulness;
curb my aimlessness;
receive my compulsiveness;
let me be easy for a moment.
O Lord, release me from the fears
and guilts which grip me so tightly;
from the expectations and opinions
which I so tightly grip,
that I may be open to receiving,
to learn something refreshingly different.
O God, gather me to be with you as you are with me.
Keep me in touch with myself,
with my needs,
my anxieties,
my angers,
my pains,
my corruptions,
that I may claim them as my own rather than blame them on someone else.
O Lord, deepen my wounds into wisdom;
shape my weakness into compassion;
gentle my envy into enjoyment,
My fear into trust,
my guilt into honesty,
my accusing finger into tender ones.
O God, gather me to be with you as you are with me. Amen.
This prayer strikes me on many different levels, but these seemed most meaningful this morning. “Deepen my wounds into wisdom.” I don’t know that wounds often lead to wisdom. We can learn from our mistakes but wounds are a different matter. When we’ve been wounded, we tend to draw into ourselves, cling to our pain or anger, and hold on to our grudges. What (or who) can make the difference? The God who promises that he can take all things that happen to us in our lives and make good out of them (Romans 8:28).
When you believe that God can bring good things out of bad things, he can begin to rebuild your soul and all the broken areas of your life. Wisdom, in the Bible, is a living, breathing life or spirit within us. We can nourish it and enable it to grow or we can starve it and kill it.
As you pray for yourself the words of Ted Loder’s prayer, which words speak to you most clearly today? This is one of those prayers that I believe if you pray it for several days will speak to you differently each time. Have you ever noticed that with some prayers or some verses in the Bible?