The Seventh Prayer

First Prayer for the Seventh Chapter

Heavenly One, I want to invite you to paint a beautiful picture on the fabric of my community today. I Hope with my whole heart that all would know what it means to feel valued without needing to feel important, to feel loved without needing to feel central, and to feel supported without being afraid of criticism. Momma, everyday I see evidence of people who have lost their trust in your day-to-day mercies. I see evidence of a people who want to find safety and fulfillment in their own devices, to the exclusion of others. I see people who live in a fantasy that has become a nightmare. God, please touch the Israel inside all of us and be in the process of healing our species of our own misguided ideas. Teach us to humanize not only ‘the other’ but ourselves – bring us down off our own pedestals. Teach a zealot like me to have compassion for Israel when it reminds me of the worst aspects of my own self – help me to see into the mirror, ironically, by taking my eyes off of myself and onto my global family. Teach me that my meaning is not more when I am central because then I have lost my context. Likewise, help me to celebrate that my context means just a little bit more because I am in it!

Yet today is not about me or my job but about remembering the loving support of the family that HAS contextualized me. Thank you for my parents who both not only love me but have been remarkably open to my mission. Thank you for my sister, who I pray I can grow closer to as the years advance. Thank you for grandparents who taught me the best ways to be and for a boss in Palestine who appears to be tying-together and shedding new light on all of what they had to say. Thank you for friends at work and in my host family who have shown me my value precisely. Yet, thank you also for my colleagues around the world who were my first, true peer group—not just in terms of intelligence but in the qualities of our character. I do not know where I would be without the support from the other “YAMs”. All due credit should also go to my most die-hard friends from high school and college – one of whom is nearly a full-fledged psychologist* and the other is, well, Hannah K. Kearby: a unique and sweet character.
With some sadness, I thank you for a friend who needs some space right now. I am helpless to say or do anything except pray to you for her time of development and for me as I continue to wonder...
Thank you for new communities who I have not fully explored – and who have not fully explored me yet either?
Thank you for quiet-time today in the Ramallah Friends’ Center. I certainly hope that you will cause my mind to fruit with fresh insights. Nevertheless, I thank you, El Shaddai, that I never have to be alone in my thoughts because I am part of an entire mural of humanity. Beautiful!

Amen!

*Corinne Brenneman