Good and gracious God, we all need comfort these days. We know we’re not the first of your children to be in a difficult place. Like our ancestors in faith, we struggle with complications of competing values that become ethical challenges. We fret.
Where can we look for resilience? Patience? Clarity? Empathy? Compassion? Joy?
Some of us retreat in times like these. We find a place to hide and surrender to the inevitable.
Are we missing the angels you send, God, because getting help is not in our emotional vocabulary? Because we can sometimes be so sure we know better? What kind of humility does it require to wait, to listen, to be influenced, to change?
Perhaps we can begin to see a vision of the future you offer, God: a vision that assumes all have enough.
It takes tremendous courage to cling to this vision, especially if the world around us marches on with a short-term, “get what you can” value system. Surround us, God, with your angels of hope, justice and mercy.
This message is an excerpt from “Amen: Angels to help us” by Catherine Maltoky in the March 2021 issue of Gather.
Daily Grace has been offering you things to ponder and things to pray about for more than 10 years. For free. Women of the ELCA provides many other free online resources, too—see welca.org/resources. Please support Women of the ELCA at welca.org/give.
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