I think I know what you’re feeling about the service you’re planning or running right now.
Let me encourage you—this isn’t just another service. Actually, I need to tell that to myself from time to time. I work at an event-centric church, which means there’s an event for everything, and I’m grateful; events are why I have a job. However, it’s easy to just start punching in and punching out after a few years of weekend services, midweek prayer meetings, youth events, volunteer events, funerals, men’s events, women’s events, conferences, and so on.
This is holy work, and though it’s repetitive nature makes it feel common, what happens is uncommon.
People aren’t coming for the event, though (hopefully). Rather, they’re coming to meet the Lord. A service full of worship followed by the preaching of the word is the primary place many (most?) people meet with the Lord, and we are the keepers of that sacred space. This is holy work, and though it’s repetitive nature makes it feel common, what happens is uncommon.
How can we avoid that time-clock-punching mentality?
We just bring our heart, wherever it is that day, and that’s good news, friends. We don’t need to get hyped like hockey players huffing smelling salts before they hit the ice. The emotions don’t matter, really, because they are what they are, and the Lord can take whatever we have and turn it into something we never imagined. We can rest in the knowledge that the Spirit completes his work by his power, not our faulty, failing, flailing, fickle emotions. All that he asks from us is in an invite, a surrender to what he wants to do, which usually comes through prayer.
How kind and gracious the Lord is, friends.
Despite being a bit of a wild Pentecostal, I’ve come to love liturgy. I love it because I often find myself not knowing what to pray, so having a prayer that’s proved itself faithful in forming and encouraging Christians for a few hundred years (often more—sometimes thousands if it’s from a psalm) to lean on is handy, to say the least.
For me, it started with St. Patrick’s Breastplate, which tradition holds St. Patrick himself prayed as he evangelized the Irish people while enduring threats from the native Celts and their witchcraft. Here’s the excerpt I prayed from the complete prayer, a quick and heavy reminder that my ministry was not my own doing, but God’s:
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.
Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
I’ve come across a few more over the years. Here’s a list for you to explore to perhaps find a prayer that will help you come to a place of surrender no matter what you’re feeling inside day to day:
[1] This is a link to the daily office, which is the daily readings and prayers from the BCP, but you can find other liturgies from that site.
