Ernest Campbell offers a set of three “Christmas prayers,” written to help us move our attention from all this festive season brings, to the reason for the season, as they say. Let us join with Campbell and one another in the days leading to Christmas morning to pray our way to life in Jesus’ name.
O God, our Father, whom we trust but do not fully understand; whom we love, but surely not with all our hearts; give us, we pray, not the kind of Christmas we want, but the kind we need.
We live with a sense of busyness and anxiousness;
remind us of the providence that marks a sparrow’s fall.
We live with a shrinking and shriveled sense of personal worth;
remind us of a love to which each soul is precious.
We live with a sense of the years going by too quickly or longing them to do so;
remind us of abiding purpose in which all that comes to
pass partakes of the eternal.
We live with a sense of wrongs committed and goods undone or
unattempted;
remind us that for such the Shepherd seeks, the Father waits.
Our souls take their rest, O Father, in the joy of what you are. Let it be enough that you are for us, with us, and within us,
through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.