The First Prayer for the Third Chapter

Great Spirit and guide, I need you to teach me the language of journeying. Please break my gaze on the horizon and open my eyes to what is happening around us all. I am like almost all human beings in my desire to see outcomes. Day after day, I have searched for the procedure that would guarantee these goals. My goals were honorable, even altruistic, and came from a heart that wanted to do right and build strong relationships but my love for procedure has brought me again and again to desperation and hopelessness because I become lost in occurrences and managing every effect. I have lost sight of my practices by trying to turn them into strict disciplines and struggled with the emergent because it appears to me as a calamity! Make or Restore Faith in processes for me, Holy One. I know that I should close gaps in my life but my timelines are always too short because I crave resolution. Take me away from this anxious life of expectancy and into a life of discovery. Teach me to be attached to you and to love you above all things and people so that you can bless my ways of being rather than the products of my work.

For so long, these thoughts have been contradictory and counter-intuitive to my mind. I have prayed for consistency and seen myself failing repeatedly to bring about outcomes. Even as I study this chapter on being mindful, the changes in my mind expose more changes needed. Help me to embrace this and to let go of resolution. Help me to see how my strong desire to do things rightly and completely takes me away from mindfulness, of course, but also your ideas of what is right and complete, most of which are beyond my comprehension. Teach me to be completely engaged in practice even though I have spent a lifetime striving for results. Teach me a way so new and I pray with all my heart, asking in your many names, that you would indeed bless the results in spite of me. Nevertheless, teach me not to become desperate and discouraged when terrible outcomes come my way. Instead, help me to look back coolly and reflectively on both the happenings and my actions so I can improve my practice.

Help me to catch the slide into darkness, as this book suggests, but also note my new thoughts: I have feared the darkness so much that I became a darkness hunter. Instead, teach me to be a light-pursuer. Meet me in process and hold me in Your arms, my one-and-only Creator.

Amen