As a pastor, I have prayed with people in many different settings. I have led in congregational prayer. I have prayed at weddings and funerals. I have prayed with people before surgery. I have prayed with people nearing death. I have prayed with people through their loss of loved ones. I have been at a loss for words, but sometimes, silence and presence are the best we can offer. I am a fellow struggler with you in prayer. 

I have built the five months of prayers in my book around the theme that prayer is a conversation with God that involves praise, thanksgiving, petition, and confession. It begins with an introduction to prayer. There is a kindle edition, but the value of the hardback or paperback edition is that there are plenty of blank spaces to make personal notes. This may be a book that you will keep coming back to over the years. The following prayers are additional to the book but give you a taste of the types of prayers you will find there. I will be adding prayers as I feel led. 

Additional Prayers

Help me to see you in the person of your sick

Dearest Lord, the source of health and wholeness.

I ask that I may I see you, today and every day, in the person of your sick, and while serving them, minister to you. Though you hide yourself behind the unattractive guise of the irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable, may I still recognize you. "Jesus, my patient, how sweet it is to serve you." 

Lord, give me this seeing faith, for then my work will never be monotonous. I will ever find joy in humoring the fancies and gratifying the wishes of all poor sufferers. 

Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of the high vocation to which you have called me as well as the many responsibilities in fulfilling it. Never permit me to disgrace it, by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience. 

And, O God, while you are Jesus my patient, receive me as your patient, Jesus, bearing with my faults, looking only to my intention, which is to love and serve you in the person of each one of your sick. Lord, increase my faith, bless my efforts and work, now and for evermore.[1]

Help me to honestly open my heart to you

Lord, your love is beyond my understanding.

Knowing your love for me today, grant me the courage to honestly open my heart as I come to you in prayer. As I admit my weaknesses, I know I will receive your loving understanding and come away strengthened because of my conversation with you.

·      Forgive me for the times when I have been less than patient with others.

·      I regret the instances when I have not given others the mercy that they have extended to me.

·      I am sorry when I trivialize the principal issues and exaggerate the small stuff.

·      Forgive me for all the occasions when I fly off the handle … and thank you for the people in my life who love me anyway.

I ask you to grant me the grace to forgive myself. Help me to let go of the times when I have been less than my best. When others have forgiven me and when you have long forgotten, I still harbor feelings of shame and remorse. Help me to let go and love myself anyway, just as you love me. I pray the lessons of the past in this world, where love and forgiveness have redeemed hatred and fighting, might give me hope for the future. I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, who came that we might follow in love and life eternal.

Amen

I have been an ungrateful recipient of your holy scripture

Lord, you have been gracious in showing me who you are and whom you call me to be in the witness of Scripture.

I confess that 

·       I have been an ungrateful recipient of the vast treasure that is your holy scripture. 

·       I have heard your word and not obeyed it.

·       I believed the right things but not lived them. 

·       I claimed to know you but have not followed the life you modeled. 

·       You call me to trust, but I fail to loosen my grip of control on my thought and life. 

·       You invite me to abide, but I chase my own pursuits. 

Lord, have mercy on me. 

·       Help me to live in your word. 

·       Preserve me in my encounters with Scripture from reading into the text my own desires and prejudices. 

·       Make me ever ready to let how the Bible sees the world differently from the way I see the world surprise me. 

·       Enable me, having read the word, to put the word into effect in my life, to embody the word of Scripture in my thought and action. 

Thereby might you save me from myself and might your eternal word save my words. 

Amen.

Help me to know a long season of prayer

Intimate Friend, 

Help me to know a long season of prayer. Let it be more than just when I feel like it. Help me to pray beyond those times when I request tangible results.

Give me a devotion to prayer and a sensitivity to the Spirit praying within me. Let the bond between me and you grow strong. May stillness in your presence be like a warm embrace. Strengthen my commitment to praying as an ongoing part of life. 

In the name of the One who prays in me, through me and for me, Jesus, the risen Christ. 

Amen.

[1] Inspired by Mother Teresa of Calcutta