Prayer & Praise

Our lives are occupied territory … occupied by a cacophony of voices, and the din undoes us.

In the daytime we have no time to listen,

beset as we are by anxiety and goals and assignments and work,

and in the night the voices are so confusing we can hardly sort out what could possibly be your voice from the voice of our mothers and our fathers and our best friends and our pet projects, because they all sound so much like you.

We are people over whom that word shema has been written.

We are listeners, but we do not listen well.

So we bid you, by the time the sun goes down today or by the time the sun comes up tomorrow, by night or by day, that you will speak in ways that we can hear out beyond ourselves.

It is your speech to us that carries us where we have never been, and it is your speech to us that is our only hope.

So give us ears. Amen.
Walter Brueggemann. Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: The Prayers of Walter Brueggemann (p. 56). Kindle Edition.