e~mergent kiwi

be:holden wedding prayer

I did an outdoor wedding a few weeks ago, to a couple mad keen on cars. On the morning of the wedding, I sort of scribbled the following prayer, and it seemed to connect well.

God of love and passion, God of commitment and promises,
We pray for xxxx and xxxx today,
That, they will treat their marriage like a well-maintained Holden car,
They will pay attention to each other's oil and water and tire pressure,
That they will be quick to forgive, well able to listen to the best advice from their pit crew.

May God's grace rest on their life as they drive life's road together,

May they grow in peace as one,
Always faithful to this model of 2008,
May the love that we see today last through all their life,
through every S bend and hairpin they negotiate,
so that at the end of their days,
they may just feel as they do now.
Very happy to be in love and married. Amen.

prayer for change agent pastors

Lord, we pray for Steve,
He has a large and difficult task,
we called him to make change in this church.
Yet when he opens the windows,
it is easy to complain about the draft/draught (word choice is yours),
We pray for him today,

This was a prayer prayed at our staff gathering today. If you would like to pray, for either Steve, or for a change agent pastor you know, add your initials in the comments.

Update: a sharp-eyed blog reader has pointed out the play of word around "draft" and "draught". Since this was a prayer prayed verbally, I am not sure whether the person praying was meaning "draft" or "draught." Isn't the English language fascinating? Isn't communication fascinating? Isn't the way we got our Bible (oral words becoming written words which were for so many centuries read as oral words in church) fascinating?

prayer of gladness for nuture

We are surrounded by people who have shaped us, nurtured us, taught us to read and write, warned us, pushed us, inspired us, blessed us.

God of growth
You have shaped us
Through the love and devotion of your saints
Inspire us to follow their example
Through the true vine that is Jesus our Christ, Amen.

If you want to make this prayer your own, you could leave the initials of people you are thankful for.

For a prayer of patience, go here.
For a prayer for those walking with grief, go here.

all saints are our saints prayer

I wrote the prayer below for worship on Sunday. The church I pastor is 96 years old, so I asked some of our long-termers to describe for me the key figures in our church's history: our saints, the people who have, in God, built up God's church at Opawa. I then ended with a snippet from the Anglican prayer book.

2 of our folk will pray the following on Sunday:

Thanks God for Wyn Voyce
Our oldest living saint at 102 years
Pianonist, Singer in the choir
Ministering to Opawa through music
May we use our talents like Wyn Voyce did

ALL: Almighty God; You have built up your church
Through the love and devotion of your saints
We give you thanks for your servants
Inspire us to follow their example,
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

change

sea
thick n lumpy
green, swollen
carries
tide n time

erodes

rock
spray spume
white froth top fluid force

a bubble prayer

John Drane lead prayers at Opawa on Sunday. He blew bubbles - fragile, beautiful - and invited people to call out things they wanted prayer for. First response was from the right hand side:

a new start and new life for our church.

and a stream of bubbles drifted through the Opawa air.
Amen.