Thank you to many who engaged in prayer warfare on behalf of the 13 women who gathered in Pensacola Beach this weekend to listen and look for God’s story of grace written in their lives. It was, in a word, glorious. Today I post a prayer written by my friend Lalla Pierce in response to my request for prayer. We used this prayer as we opened the retreat, but it is a good one to return to now that our time is over. It’s really a good prayer for us to weave into our thoughts about our daily lives.
Dear God,
Exquisite Women
We come together as women, perhaps strangers to one another, but united by our search for you and your ways.
Lord, open our hearts.
Come into our midst, filling us with your grace, love, peace, and the assurance that we are never alone.
Lord, open our hearts.
Help us enter into this community for the weekend, ready to hear your still small voice, willing to share our hearts and stories, ultimately for your glory.
Lord, open our hearts.
Free us from the trappings and bondage of our lives and world: worries about what we’ve left behind, worries about what we’ll return to, anxiety over what this community will think if they truly knew our hearts, anxiety over what it will cost to fully surrender our hearts and lives to you and live in the terrifying, yet GLORIOUS freedom that brings.
Lord, open our hearts.
Help us hear your invitation to worship: in the whisper of the waves lapping at the shore, in the smell of the salty air, in the stories we’ll share, in the laughter we will hear, in the tears we may weep, in the quiet spaces of our hearts.
Lord, open our hearts.
Give us hearts that are willing to HOPE.
Lord, open our hearts.
Help us hear your invitation to become more FOR YOU and the world. With each prayer above, it is our HOPE that ultimately, all we do and think and say and learn this weekend will not be about us, but about your Kingdom. For when our hearts are truly free, then we are able to live freely for you, and it is that freedom that the world needs to see in order to believe. May this weekend free our hearts in unbelievable ways, mysterious ways, explicable only by your sacrificial love.
Lord, open our hearts.
We thank and praise you for all you have done, for who you are, and for the hope of what we can become, living in the freedom of the Resurrection.
We pray all of this in your Holy name, Jesus,
Amen.
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