A Prayer for Friday, October 14, 2011

“Because You Were So Hard-Hearted”

Make it our hearts’ desire, O God, to experience your grace in the best and most positive ways possible.

We recognize and we thank you for those concessions that you have made to our humanity and to our sinfulness; it is possible, because of your mercy, for us sometimes to justify what we feel like we have had to do even though it did not live up to your best way for us.

And if we really did have to do something because it seemed right even though we knew it was not best, then we thank you for your mercy that allows us to try to keep moving forward.

But please, O God, don’t let us take the easy way out; don’t let us nonchalantly tell ourselves that you understand our hard-headedness and our hard-heartedness and so somehow it’s just fine for us to do what we want to do.

Fill us instead with the desire to do everything we can, empowered by your love and your Spirit, to live up the highest ideals possible in our marriage relationships and in all of our relationships.

We thank you for the allowances that your grace sometimes causes you to make; but we ask you for grace that will keep us from needing the allowances so much.

Amen.

“They said to him, ‘Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of divorce and to divorce her?’ He said to them, ‘It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.’” (Matthew 19:7-9)