Prayer for the Year Ahead
Praying over our endings and beginnings at the turning of the year
Everlasting Lord, we who live out our numbered days call to You at this turning of the year.
As conflicts and trials surround us, we ask Your guidance and protection for our world, our country, our communities, our congregations, our families, and our own hearts.
Give us a sense of both the vastness of our needs and Your intimate care for each one of us.
Grant us, we pray, the ability to see ourselves more fully and more truly in the coming year. Let us graciously submit our time and our strength in service to one another out of our desire to yield our lives to Your will.
Help us to rise up each morning with the desire to serve You and with the intention to seek out, notice, and redeem each day’s opportunities as they come.
Extend to us burdens enough that we will not trust in our own understanding, but will instead seek Your wisdom in all the situations we face. May we be ever content to lean on Your perfect will and Your enduring word rather than leaning upon our own imperfect and limited vision.
Allow us the desire, ability, and willingness to see the face of Christ in our neighbors, in our coworkers, and even in our enemies.
Grant that our name of “Christian” might be worn with a self-aware humility and servant-minded heart before the world rather than a dangerous self-righteous air of superiority.
May we strive to offer a clear, warm beacon that draws others toward You rather than a shifting, inconsistent blinking that veils Your light from those who live in darkness.
Let us realize the value of holding forth a steady and faithful witness in our chaotic world.
Help us to remember that our desire is to be conformed to One who was poor that others might be made rich.
Let us be filled with the mind of Christ. Let our hearts join in His compassion for the hurting. Let our hands be filled with His work.
As He left eternal glory to live His perfect life in a tiny, forgotten place, let us be willing to leave our comforts to live out our lives serving those in need.
Send us, Lord, into our lives each day with the resolve to reflect the love and compassion of Christ to those who most desperately need it.
Let us see people as Jesus saw them; not as statistics to be lamented or projects to be managed but as eternal souls in need of real and lasting hope.
Let this sanctified vision cause us to stretch out our hands to the broken, burdened hearts that we encounter every day.
May we not seek to build up kingdoms for ourselves, but to extend the influence of His kingdom through each interaction of our lives.
Let the old, the young, the poor, the sick, the troubled, and the lonely be lifted up even as the powerful, the abusive, and the corrupt are humbled by Your truth.
Help our love be centered on the lowly and despised, and guard our hearts from the seductions of earthly power, the delusions of human wisdom, and the all-too-easy tendency to embrace oversimplified answers to complex challenges.
Remind us daily of our call to share good news and glad tidings with a despairing world.
In all we do this year, may we seek to be conformed to Jesus.
In His holy name that we seek to bear into a watching world in the coming year, amen.
What a beautiful, humble prayer for our year as Christians. Thank you!
Loved this, Will. Needed to read it tonight.