Last night I led devotions for my church council. I don’t do it often – we rotate and each of us share leadership over time. And most of them include some connection to a book that we have been reading through the year. Last night was the last meeting of this combination of leaders. In January we will welcome some new people and this meeting included saying goodbye to some others.

In light of what is happening, we would discuss finding ways to be agents of peace and hope in a time of crisis. I showed my screen on the Zoom platform. I shared four pictures: Jesus on a cross, 6000 cars in line for food distribution in the pandemic, hundreds of cars waiting in a parking lot for COVID Testing, and an impromptu ICU unit with rows of COVID-19 infected people on respirators.

We live in times when there is much to grieve. Brokenness is all around. So after showing these four pictures, I asked a simple question. “Knowing that we worship a God who has come to us and suffered with us on a cross, what is our message to the people in these pictures and their families? As we encounter things like this and others, what is our message to the world around us?”

People then shared from their thoughts and experiences. Answers focused on the importance of faith, the importance of community, the belief that God is with us and at work to bring hope and love to us, and that God calls people of faith to be agents of good through the depths of these struggles. The center of the group’s insights was that God works more “with” and is among us in these things rather than “over” in ways that pull the strings of creation to manipulate and fix problems. It was a good discussion – one where the table was set with pictures and a question and most of the time was spent as individuals did theology, out loud with each other.

We then ended with a prayer that I think should be one that we urge all people to consider praying and then living out of, “The Prayer of Saint Francis.” While there is actually no evidence that St. Francis wrote this prayer, it beautifully reframes our lives in light of a God who is with us but who is not the magic “fixer” of life’s struggles but instead comes into our lives to transform us and use us as “instruments of God’s peace.”

With that in mind, and with the hope that this familiar prayer will help you and others in these stressful times, I end by sharing it here.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offence, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.
O Master, let me not seek as much
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.

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