Holy Spirit, open my heart to understand how precious I am to you, how loved I am by you. Open the eyes of my soul, to see the gifts you have put before me this day. Give me the grace to recognize each encounter with you. Teach me to respond in gratitude, to grow in gratitude. Teach me to be generous, as you are generous with me, and to collaborate with you in serving my sister and my brother for your greater glory.
Holy, you are the most holy one. Draw me towards holiness. I see, hear, and touch glimpses of you and your love as your will is fulfilled before me. You have given me this day to live.
Spirit, inspire me to rise up and live alive, choosing your will, not mine. Pulling the weeds of temptation by choosing what I want and planting seeds of your promises. Provide me the fortitude to be gentle with my aging body and tuning into its needs. I’m sorry for that many times when I have abused myself, starving it for movement and nutrition by falling into the trap of abandoning my body. By putting myself last on the list of people to care for. When I prioritized the comfort of work or lack of discipline rather than movement or healthy choices. I forgive myself and I’m open to your purification to cleanse me and teach me the way to do this. Help me lose the all or nothing and live in the tension and call on the Spirit of self-control. Protect my thoughts that become desires, I will bring them to you. I will use the relationship with my body to bring me closer to you.
I commit myself to you, establish my plans. This is how I will serve you today living in your power and glory. By loving the temple of my aging body. God be praised, hallelujah is my song, in gratitude.
I’ve always been a person who accepts change despite my desire to cling to the comfort of the known. Lately I’ve been leaning into using AI to help with my work writing. It’s a great tool, just like the calculator has been. I got curious and asked Microsoft CoPilot to scour SWG and write a poem of gratitude which follows. Despite it not being crafted directly from my heart, it did a pretty good job!
Heavenly Father,
I come before You with a heart full of gratitude. Thank You for the countless blessings You bestow upon me each day. Your goodness surrounds me, and I am in awe of Your love and grace.
Thank You for the gift of integrity, for guiding me to live a life of honesty and virtue. Help me to walk in Your truth and to reflect Your goodness in all that I do.
I am grateful for the moments of stillness where I can feel Your presence and for the strength You provide during times of challenge. Your love sustains me, and Your wisdom guides me.
Lord, I thank You for the beauty of creation, for the people You have placed in my life, and for the opportunities to grow in faith and love. May I always be mindful of Your goodness and strive to cultivate it within myself and in the world around me.
I will give thanks to you, Lord, with all my heart, I will tell of all your wonderful deeds. Psalm 9:1
Lord, I come before you with an open heart, longing to see your goodness all around me. Gratitude is your precious gift, but sometimes my eyes are clouded and my spirit grows weary. Come Holy Spirit, ignite within me a deep and abiding thankfulness. Help me to see your blessings in the ordinary and the extraordinary. May each sunrise, each act of kindness, fill me with wonder. In times of challenge, let gratitude be my compass, reminding me of your faithfulness and guiding me towards hope. Use my grateful heart, Lord. May my life radiate your joy and draw others closer to you. Thank you for the transformative power of gratitude, a gift I long to receive fully and share freely. Amen
Our world seems to be filled with darkness and strife. People seem to be focused on their own desires and will do anything to achieve them. Individualism prevails breading our disconnection from relationship hence our high rates of loneliness and anxiety in the United States.
Praise God there is a kingdom that does not belong to the “world.” The “world” is the realm of sin, selfishness, hatred, and violence. The kingdom is full of kindness, generosity, mercy, justice and love.
As we enter fall and the final quarter of 2024, we move into the Season of Gratitude in our prayer where we thank God for what we have been given. This is done in prayers of thanksgiving. I love this statement, before you ask God for anything, first thank him for everything.
When you sit down to eat, pray. When you eat bread, do so thanking Him for being so generous to you. If you drink wine, be mindful of Him who has given it to you for your pleasure and as a relief in sickness. When you dress, thank Him for His kindness in providing you with clothes. When you look at the sky and the beauty of the stars, throw yourself at God’s feet and adore Him who in His wisdom has arranged things in this way. Similarly, when the sun goes down and when it rises, when you are asleep or awake, give thanks to God, who created and arranged all things for your benefit, to have you know, love and praise their Creator.
As we recover the practice of lament, we will meditate on the fourth and final movement of lament: confess your trust.
Confess Your Trust
Finally, a confession of trust in God acknowledges that, even if the answer to our prayer is unknown, God is trustworthy, whatever the circumstances.
David declares, “I will declare your name to my people” (Ps 22:22) and “I trust in your unfailing love” (Ps 13:5) as he brings his psalms to a close, even when an immediate resolution is not found. And yet Psalm 88 doesn’t conclude this way. While the psalmist cannot bring himself to declare praise as the climax of his song, he has already acknowledged “the God who saves”.
Sometimes we need a form of prayer that would help us turn to God, honestly name our suffering while appealing for God to hear and respond with comfort and help, and counsel us to confess our trust. May the psalms of lament be a guide for your prayers in the difficult moments you face.
As we recover the practice of lament, we will meditate on the third movement of lament: appeal for God to hear and respond.
Appeal for God to Hear and Respond
Laments don’t end with complaints. The third movement is an appeal for God to hear and respond.
The grounds for this appeal is God’s word; his character and his promises. Even in the darkness of Psalm 88, the psalmist appeals to a God who hears—“May my prayer come before you; turn your ear to my cry” (Ps 88:2).
David similarly appeals to God: “Look on me and answer, Lord my God” (Ps 13:3). As we lament, we not only express our difficulties to God, but we call upon him to hear us in our moment of need—knowing that he alone is our source of comfort, hope and help.
As people living after Jesus’ death and resurrection, our prayers of lament are now anchored in what we believe and know to be true about the character and promises of God revealed in Christ. We can know of God’s faithfulness to save us and meet us in the depths of our cries even more than the psalmists.
As we recover the practice of lament, we will meditate on the second movement of lament: cry out your complaint.
Cry Out Your Complaint
After turning to God, each of these psalms cries out with a complaint—a defining characteristic of lament. This involves naming the problem being seen or experienced and expressing it vividly before God. That might sound untrusting, perhaps even ungodly. But this is far from unbelief or ungodliness—this is a righteous response to the wrongfulness of life’s circumstances. It’s a refusal to wish away suffering, stiffen our upper lip or “be strong” in the face of sin and suffering.
We see this in Psalm 13 when David cries out to God when he seems absent in his life:
How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? (Psalm 13:1-2).
Again, David feels distance from God in Psalm 22 and questions why he is forsaken (Ps 22:1-2)—words which Jesus himself takes up as his own on the cross (Mt 27:46). In Psalm 88, the psalmist expresses a sense of grief that is evidently unbearable:
You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths … my eyes are dim with grief. (Ps 88:6-9).
Crying out our complaints with heart-wrenching honesty is not only okay—but godly.
Psalms of lament show us that crying out our complaints with heart-wrenching honesty is not only okay—but godly. Even in the depths of the pit, the loss of a loved one, or a moment of despair—God anticipates and hears each of our cries.
Smitten With Goodness 