Pray as you go

Pray as you go is an app that I listen to a couple of days a week and it is also the way I seem to be living my life.

In the last four days I have preached a funeral and two sermons. I have played pickleball and games with my family.  Yesterday Marnie's house lost electricity  and so I have welcomed her and her three daughters into my home in the interim.  Right now Addie is "at school" in one bedroom, Marnie is "at work" in another bedroom and Maggie is watching TV before she "goes to school."

And I pray as I go

Today's app contains these words

Let me live as a child of light.  I ask the Lord to open my eyes to what he wants me to see.  Shine a light into my life.

The story into which we enter into imaginatively is about the blind man who hear Jesus passing by:  Jesus, son of the living God, have mercy on me."

I sit and so resonate with this.  Because his desire is to see.  

Last week, Pastor John was out of town and I went to play pickleball at church.  The church has bought a pickleball net and it was not where we had left it -by the back door.  I searched everywhere and could not find it.  Fortunately some of us have our own nets and we were able to play - but I was concerned that there was a pickleball net thief in Canal Winchester!  

When John came back in town he told me that he had put it under the couch in my office - sticking out a little so I would see it.  I did not.  And I told him - don't you know that half the time I am unconscious?

And I know that to be true.  What I don't know is what I miss seeing - I only know what I am able to glimpse.  As I reflect on the past weekend I certainly see glimpses of the holy - in the words that God gives me in the preaching I do, in the beauty of a chilly morning in the park playing pickleball with a daughter, in the blessing of interactions with some of the older saints of the church, in the family life I get to partake in again for a day or so watching mother and daughters negotiate life together.  

As a new week begins -  my prayer is to see - to see what God wants me to see, to see the beauty as well as the pain.  To have the faith to then go and do what is mine to do. 

I am praying in the morning and I am praying as I go.  Even in the midst of increasing cases of covid and a peculiar time in our nation of transition/no transition God is here.  Loving, healing, calling.

Open our eyes!