Father,
We are grateful for
the many good gifts that You give to us. We are your sons and daughters, and
You are our loving Father. We offer our prayers to You, and You always listen
and respond with wisdom. We can hope in the midst of pain because You have showered
us with Your promises. You really are so very good to us.
Father, You are also
a refuge for our souls. Day by day, we face the various difficulties of life.
Most of them are trivial, mere annoyances, though they still get in the way of
things. Then, there are those more serious incidents. And life pauses a bit to
deal with them. But then, there are those times of absolute terror. We’ve hit
some terrible crisis. These may not be many but when they happen, life is
derailed.
But how good to
know that when these frightening crises strike, we can find refuge, safety,
comfort, under the shadow of Your wings. What peace that gives to us as we are
confronted with the pain of these terrible moments. We are not alone. You, our God,
are with us to protect us and to comfort us and to guide us. How good.
There are, sadly,
those who do not understand You, who do not understand how You guide us through
this life. They see some crisis come into our lives, and they scoff, asking why
You didn’t just keep it from ever happening. They see this and question Your
love and Your power. They talk about how, if You exist, You are not worth
knowing. But we know better. We have no doubts about Your love or Your power.
We know that the crises that we face are from You. We know that You have the
power to stop them at any moment. But You don’t. No, instead, You send them our
way. You send them for our good, as an expression of Your love. There is much
that we can learn while in such situations. We can learn, in a dramatic way, how
weak and needy we really are. We come to see in vivid ways that we are not the
masters of our fate, nor the captains of our souls. No, You are the one who
rules while we are small, quite limited creatures. That is reality. And it is a
lesson that everyone needs to learn.
You send us these
crises, but You do not intend for us to deal with them alone. As You send them
our way, You also offer Your comfort and care and guidance to us. You do this
so that we will endure what You’ve sent and gain the wisdom that You intend. We
are grateful that You are this kind of God to us.
Father, so much of reality is hidden by mystery. There are so many things that we have no clue
about. But this we know. You are our God. And it is Your promise to bless us
with much good so that we will come to understand what we need to understand
and thus flourish. We thank You for the blessings of all that You send our way.
Through Christ our Lord, Amen.