A Prayer

Father,

In Your great kindness You sent Jesus to look for us lost sheep. And He persisted in looking until He found us and brought us home to You. We are so grateful for this. Because of what Jesus has done, our lives are so different from the lives of so many around us, the many who don't know You as Father. We enjoy Your constant presence with us by the Spirit. We know that when we call out to You, You are listening and will respond with love and wisdom. We know that whatever happens to us here, it's part of Your good plan for our lives. We are greatly blessed, and we know it.

And yet, Father, while there are many things that are really good about our lives now, there are still some things that we are missing. There are parts of being whole people, and holy people, that we are not yet experiencing. And we know that we will not experience them until Jesus returns and the age to come becomes the age that is here. Father, we yearn for then. We yearn for the day when our partial experience of being human will become complete. We wonder, how long? How long will we need to wait until the redemption that You have begun finds its perfection?

Father, we long for then because that's when we will see You face to face. Our sense of Your presence with us will be pure and unclouded by the many things that interfere now. We long for then because that's when we will get to see our Savior and be able to tell Him how grateful we are for what He has done for us. We long for then because that's when we will live each day, busy doing important things but without any frustration, only satisfaction. We long for then because that's when we will finally be together as the one massive family that we are, Your family, enjoying each other in ways that will be astounding.

But we aren't there yet. We're still here. And we wait. But we wait because You think that this is the best way to pursue Your plan. So, we ask Father that You would give us the grace to wait. We don't ask that our yearnings be removed. Not at all. But that we should yearn patiently, assured that one day what we so desire will finally be ours.

Psalm 13.1