Forgiving God (A Prayer)

God, sometimes I wonder

If you stand for weak apologies,

or how you stand them at all…

The “I’m sorry if your feelings were hurt”

or the half-hearted apologies that blame…

other things like mental illness or pills or bad sleep…

or anything…

(I call these non apologies what do you call them God?)

and I also wonder…

and how you view our funding for guns and military complexes

while children are hungry in the street

How do we quickly fund war-things

and let people die of plague and hunger and homelessness

I know you are a forgiving God…

but I also wonder if we take that too much for granted

If that is why Jesus looked at Jerusalem

and cried.

But then I think of how Jesus

washed Judas’s feet,

and lovingly forewarned Peter of his

thrice, THRICE ill-timed denial.

And I think,

Only you Christ, know

that somehow,

we humans can still change.

Even when we humans

Might give up on humanity.

You don’t

Well, you and Dr. Who.

So I’ll hold onto that,

With my pinky fingers–

even when I lose grasp

and my hands no longer want to fold

in prayers

and words of forgiveness

do not come from my lips.

I’ll rely on your forgiveness,

instead of mine

and work on the pinky

finger’s worth of prayer

instead.

Amen.

Feel free to use/adapt/share with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta

Author: katyandtheword

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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