Tall Monastic Guy: Denver daily prayer...

March 28, 2011

Denver daily prayer...

I gotta share an encouraging development going on in my life and work in these past couple weeks. For years I’ve tried my hand at several ways of getting into a habitual rhythm of daily prayer. I’ve got a stack of books about daily devotionals. I’ve got prayer beads and a variety of great prayers I can pray with them. I’ve got candles on my desk, apps on my phone, etc. etc. The need to train my muscles for game time ministry is apparent but sticking to any sustainable discipline is hard.

What I’ve learned is that it’s difficult to sustain a regular rhythm of prayer if the plan isn’t 1) communal: Am I praying in the company of my community? 2) missional- Am I praying in a way that integrates with my life and work in the city?

After weeks of having it recommended, I finally grabbed Common Prayer: A liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, which spins the traditional Book of Common Prayer into a daily reading of scripture and liturgy that specifically emphasizes issues of justice and poverty. This has been an excellent resource and I'm grateful for all the hard work and contributions that went into compiling this!

To compliment that great book I put together a daily theme that goes unchanged from week to week which I’ll share below. The hope of the theme was to create an idea that I take with me throughout the twists and turns of my day, which can give me some sense of focus as I pause for noon, dinner, and evening prayer. I’ve begun practicing this rhythm individually and twice a week as I connect with Access partners to pray as a community in the morning. Starting Monday April 4^th we’ll begin implementing the morning rhythm for the students at Issachar and the surrounding east side neighborhood.

Here’s the daily themes for each week...

Monday- Restoration: Today we focus on our restored relationship to God and the call on us to be stewards of God’s creation. The Gospel comes to us in the midst of the created world, which was made through Jesus Christ and is being recreated through him.

Tuesday- Christ our Savior: Today we recognize that we carry the incarnational presence of Christ into the world. Today may others read the scriptures in us and may our eyes be open to see the scripture in them.

Wednesday- Denver, Our Playground!: Today we concentrate our prayer and energy on the city, on our immediate community, and our place of ministry and its people. May we find creative ways to actively encourage those in your own house and all the places you find yourself today.

Thursday- Mud & Spit: Just as Jesus used the dirt under his feet to heal the blind beggar, today we seek to take notice of all the little and often over-looked things (like graffiti or the sound of birds) that are a part of our everyday activity.

Friday- The Way of the Cross: Today we focus on the wholeness that is achieved through repentance, forgiveness, & reconciliation. As I head into the weekend is my spirit one of gratitude or resentment? How will the Cross impact my weekend?

Saturday- The Kingdom of God: Today we focus on the cloud of witnesses that have left a legacy before us. And we pray that we as individuals, and as a community will leave a legacy marked by the refreshment of Christ.

Sunday- Sabbath Shalom: Today we focus on both simple rest and celebration of our Creator, our Liberator, and our Resurrection and Life.

Posted at 10:28 AM in Access, Books, missional/incarnational, Neighborhood Stuff, prayer, Street Psalms | Permalink

Comments

beautiful sharing. it has compelled me to reflect on my prayer life with the Lord even more so now.

Posted by: Naomi | April 06, 2011 at 12:07 AM

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Words make Worlds...

"It becomes so clear to me as I grow older that people who change, and keep changing, are the only people who grow up." -Richard Rohr
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." -John Wooden
"Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody. Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody." - Henri Nouwen
"Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of spirituality begins where we are now in the mess of our lives." -Mike Yaconelli
"But that doesn’t mean community is easy. For everything in this world tries to pull us away from community, pushes us to choose ourselves over others, to choose independence over interdependence, to choose great things over small things, to choose going fast alone over going far together." -Shane Claiborne
"Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." Albert Einstein
"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Howard Thurman
"A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Dr. Martin Luther King
"Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful--- Christian community is the final apologetic." -Francis Schaefer
"It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools." Wendell Berry
"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than the particular country in which he was born." -Francois Fenelon
"Ministry cannot be about maintenance, but it is about gathering, about embrace, about welcoming home all sorts of and conditions of people; home is a place for mother tongue, of basic soul food, of old stories told and treasured, of being at ease, known by name, belonging without qualifying for membership." -Walter Brueggemann
"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to being the particular poet or particular monk that they are intended to be by God." "In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be." -Thomas Merton
"God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God's been speaking through them ever since. So, if God chooses to speak through you don't think to highly of yourself." -Rich Mullins
"We must become holy not because we want to feel holy but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us." Mother Teresa
"I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self." Henri Nouwen