A Personal Daily Prayer

I had an experience almost thirteen years ago when I went up to Princeton Theological Seminary for a week-long summer session on preaching. As I usually do when I travel I became a total introvert.

I’m always an introvert, but I so often have to act like an extrovert because of my work that when I travel I tend to curl inward and soak up some me time. And I was doing this at Princeton. Here’s the picture: at one point between classes I was out on the campus lawn, sitting under a tree, writing a haiku. That’s the kind of stuff introverts do when surrounded by strangers, at least the introverted nerds.

I began to notice that everyone else seemed to be walking around between classes in groups, social arrangements in which they were getting to know each other, and I thought, “Wow, look at them. What am I doing?” I was like, “I need to go interact with these people and not just play introvert for the week. We’re only here together a few days, and I could easily waste this opportunity to make some new friends.”

It's not wrong to be an introvert, and I still am an introvert, but there was something here I didn't want to miss. Now, I didn't jump up and go join my classmates in that moment, but I did end up composing a prayer instead of a haiku under the tree that day, eventually writing these simple words: Let me love. Let me learn. Let me serve. I decided that my three main values for that day and all days would be to love, learn and serve. My own personal daily prayer was born.

I’ve carried that prayer with me now for almost 13 years and found it resilient to the different themes and movements of life. I’ve used it as a morning prayer, a beginning place of reflection when my day is not going well, and when I feel a dissonance within my life. I've often found that when life seems to be getting off-track I’m neglecting one or two of these movements: I'm not loving enough, I'm missing what needs to be learned, or I'm a getting a bit too self-centered and need to get back to some service of others.

It was only last year, after 12 years of praying that prayer, that I added a new line, four more words: "...and keep me grateful." It's been a blessing to journey with a personal daily prayer. It's been a prayer, at times a mantra, and it's always been a compass for keeping me headed in the right direction and expressing of my faith in tangible ways.

What’s your prayer? I invite you to make an exercise of cooking down a favorite passage of scripture into an expression of prayer. Or maybe it's not a passage you want to use, but an collection of the great themes of your faith as you understand them. It doesn’t have to rhyme. It could be something from the end of Romans 8. You could use Micah 6:8. Maybe you can use the way that Jesus sums up the Law in Matthew 22: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind… and ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

May God bless you in this exercise. May we all find new and fresh ways to love the world and it’s people, learn something which we didn’t know or understand before, and may our loving and knowing the world lead us to serve its needs with greater joy. Amen!

Be blessed, Rev. Todd