REFLECTIONS
January 2, 2011
 
 
The Lord is my strength and my song;
he has become my salvation.
Psalms 118:14
 
 
New Year’s Prayer
 
Gracious and loving God, we come to you today at the beginning of a New Year. We enter it with the freshness of a new birth. It is a time when much of the old has been washed away and in some ways our slates are wiped clean. But everything is not new.
We carry into it illnesses that weaken us, broken relationships that divide us, and wars that place many in harm’s way.  Even still, the New Year brings with it our hope for a better world. 
Our needs exceed our abilities to meet them without your power to heal, shelter to protect, and love to bring us peace. So Loving God, even with all our human frailties, scars, and uncertainties at this new beginning, we come to you as newborn children.
We come to you to ask for peace in our war-torn world. We ask not only for the end of the wars that threaten the lives of so many, but also for a peace that can only come through your loving hands. Help us to release the pride that causes us look to ourselves as the source of strength; and to rid ourselves of desires for possession, position, and power that have crept into our lives as the gods we worship in place of you.
Gracious God, we seek your forgiveness for the wrongs we have done to you and to our fellow man. We seek your help to release our resentments toward those who have hurt us and to seek forgiveness from those whose lives we have wounded by word or deed. Help restore broken relationships through a reconciliation that will help us love each other as you have called us all to do.
We ask you for healing of the diseases that reduce the quality of life we seek and threaten the breath of life you have so graciously given. Yet, even as we ask for good health, we submit to your will fully knowing that you will not ask more of us than we can bear.
But most of all, Loving God, we seek to live our lives as you would have us live—to love you with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength and with all our mind; and, to love our neighbor as ourselves. Help us to turn our lives toward your Son, Jesus the Christ, for only by facing toward him can our lives reflect the Savior. And it is in his holy name that we pray.
                                                                                    Amen
 
“You are the light of the world.”
RichardÌ


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