The following is a prayer written by Joseph Tetlow. Tetlow is a Jesuit priest who writes about spirituality and prayer. This prayer is taken from his book "Choosing Christ in the World".

James E. Adams writes that, when we pray the peace prayer, and the risky, passionate love for God that it calls out of us, it's a good thing to be mindful that we're praying for something that we may actually not want! He echoes St. Augustine's plea before God: "God, make me chaste and holy -- just not yet!" And yet, Adams writes, we are called "anew each day to live the gospel", and that, when can habitualize the understanding that prayer is an act of will, we're less likely to pray or not pray based on how we feel.

A helpful question to ask is: "Is my commitment to prayer too dependent on my mood or my feelings"? (p.25) 

In his book Let Me Sow Love: Living the Peace Prayer of St. Francis, James E. Adams writes "Prayer is an act of worship inspired by the Holy Spirit. What we ask for in the peace prayer or any other prayer reveals what is valuable to us -- or in some cases, what we think that we should value. We trust that the Holy Spirit inspires us to ask for the right things in prayer. Yet we must always have the even more basic expectation that the Holy Spirit inspires us to pray, period....Prayer is a profound act of worship that that we freely give when we sense who we are in relation to our Creator. The need to pray is what we sense when we know ourselves and when we know God" (p.22).

Adams suggests different ways to reflect on our practices of prayer. A particularly simple and appealing suggestion is to practise mindfulness around recognizing God as our Creator, and how all that we have comes from him. It's a way of reverencing life, and helps us to nurture the kind of gratitude that keeps our eyes, ears, and hearts open to recognize his presence in the world.

Some prayerful questions for today might be:

How can I be mindful of God's presence in my life, in the people I meet, and in the world around me?

Hhat keeps me from practicing this kind of mindfulness?   

Many of us can't really point to a time in our lives when we started to believe in Jesus. Others can point to a time in their life when faith became something important, and when they sensed things were different because of God's presence in their lives. Conversion is a mysterious thing, and each of us has a unique story about when we fell in love with Jesus.

It's curious that we describe Christian faith as believing "in" Jesus. If we really believe that Jesus is who he says he is, than wouldn't it make more sense to frame faith as simply "believing" Jesus? Just a thought!

And what does belief mean for how we live our faith? Shane Claiborne is a young man who, with a few friends, formed a Christian community called "The Simple Way" in inner city Philedelphia. He has some amazing insight into how conversion is an ongoing experience in our lives, and how, if we truly believe what we say we do, then we faith has as much to do with "being" as "believing". The following is a short exerpt from his bookThe Irresistable Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical....

 "...For even if the whole world believed in resurrection, little would change until we began to practice it. We can believe in CPR, but people will remain dead until someone breathes new life into them. And we can thell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.

 There is a kind of conversion that happens to people not because of how we talk but because of how we live. And our little experiments in truth become the schools for conversion, where folks can learn what it means for the old life to be gone and the new life to be upon us, no longer taking the broad path that leads to destruction. Conversion is not an event but a process." 

How does this inspire you (or not) to re-imagine church?