Prayers from Pastor Megan in Chicago

our pastor megan sent these poems the other day. i want to remember them. thank you, megan.

"a prayer for returning to God after enduring a difficult time"

god, I need to know that you are with me, that you hear my cry. i long to feel your presence not just this day, but every day. when i am weak and in pain, i need to know you are beside me. that in itself is often comfort enough.

i do not pretend to know your ways, to know why this world you have created can be so beautiful, so magnificent, and yet so harsh, so ugly, and so full of hate.

the lot you have bestowed upon me is a heavy one. i am angry. i want to know why: why the innocent must suffer, why life is so full of grief.

there are times when i want to have nothing to do with you. when to think of you bring nothing but confusion and ambivalence.

and there are times, like this time, when i seek to return to you, when i feel the emptiness that comes when i am far from you.

watch over me and my loved ones. forgive me for all that i have not been. help me to appreciate all that i have and to realized all that i have to offer.

help me to find my way back to you so that i may never feel alone. amen.


and now something else, because it just occurred to me that you'd enjoy it. i used this as the call to worship this past sunday when i was leading worship:

Poems can’t be translated; they can at best be approximated in a different language.
In a poem the language counts as much as the message.
God is the poet.
If we want to know what God says in a tomato, we must look at a tomato,
feel it, smell it, bite into it, have the juice and seeds squirt all over us when it pops.
We must savor it and learn this tomato poem “by heart.”
But what God must say can’t be exhausted in tomato language.
So, God gives us lemons and speaks in Lemonese.
Living by the Word means learning God’s language, one by one, a lifetime long.
--Brother David Steindl-Rast (senior member of a Benedictine community in the finger lakes region of NY, Mount Saviour Monastery), Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer