Processing with God: Narrative Lectionary, Liturgy, Prayers
#BreakBlessBuild prayer (inspired by #NextChurch)
Lord, we confess we are Breaking. Shards of our personality lie upon the floor, mixed with the pieces of relationships we are trying to pick up and maintain.
It’s hard to see what parts of me are missing, because everything is so messy. I’m a mess, my house is a mess, and what is time in this mess anyway?
And we want to build so fast, God, but we don’t know the landscape yet.
How many things have to break before we start to rebuild? So far we’ve lost a dishwasher, an oven, an HVAC system, 3 phones, 2 tablets and a computer.
And they are nothing compared to the families we have broken, the healthcare system that is broken, the minimum wage is broken, education is broken, and whiteness breaks everything else along the way.
Is this how your people felt, when they lost their Temple?
Is this how Mary felt when she broke the perfume over your feet?
Is this how your disciples felt when they left you to die on the cross?
God, we are broken. Teach us to build. Help us to build peace, build hope, build relationships. Stop our hands from building structures, edifices and properties. Teach us instead to build up each other.
Bless us Jesus, with your abudant blessings that neither depend upon our brokenness or our building. Instead it is your binding–magnitizing us with love, encouraging us to love and serve one another.
Bless us, Because…
Just Because.
Break us, Bless us, Build us through our binding to you we pray.
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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katyandtheword 