[From the archives]
God,
Times are tough.
Not everyone works their dream job. Not everyone’s free to chase the place where passion and aptitude collide.
Thank You for hard-workers – men and women – willing to leverage all they are, for all their families are becoming. Thank You for nose-to-the-grindstoners who sacrifice pleasure, possessions and prestige in favour of car services and hockey sticks and weed-killer for the driveway.
God, You know the time-money-energy ratio making up their capacity and how there always seems to be too little of at least two of those.
Yet You’re the loaves-and-fish miracle provider.
Enlarge their hearts to cope with all they carry. Make a wise way where there seems to be none, so they’d be pleasantly surprised by pockets of down-time: to reboot, and re-calibrate their resolve to be faithful.
I pray for copious grace to grease the wheels of the daily grind. Help them find the happy rhythm of relentlessly, courageously showing up day after boring ordinary day to do what needs doing, even though obligations and responsibilities aren’t always perfectly aligned with aspirations.
Strong Saviour, give them renewed excitement to create opportunities for a growing generation. Give them a fresh vision of the future they’re shaping and the legacy they’re leaving. Make good their tenacity to stay in the trenches and fight self-pity and self-preservation, temptation and resentment.
Help them see themselves the way You see them: a fortress of integrity, protection and provision for those you’ve placed in their care. In the worry and drudgery of too much month at the end of the money, don’t let them lose their sense of wonder or sense of humour.
Help high-earners and only-just-survivors challenge culture’s lie that you live and then you die, and it would be cool to be comfortable in between. Help them rise above the mediocrity of merely living for luxury.
Remind them, Jesus, with every breadwinning pay cheque that You are the bread of life.
Remind them that they’re winning bread – and winning others over to You, bread of life, through thousands of small heroic decisions that few will ever see or know about. Let them never forget: our highest calling is only ever to be extraordinary reflections of You – extraordinary conduits of Your glory, not our agenda.
God, lift the shroud of pressure and panic. Give them Your mantle of peace and perspective. Make them fearless and humble. Settle their souls with Spirit-level equilibrium – so that deep beneath surface noise and melee and even helpful God-given adrenaline that gets the job done, they would be quiet. Content. Unshaken.
With every rude awakening of morning alarms wrenching them into new days, assure them that You, Sovereign Lord, are their strength. You make them as surefooted as a deer, able to tread upon the heights.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen.
. . .
Have a wonderfully restful weekend.
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