Tuesday Prayer: 48

This is my 48th 'Tuesday Prayer' post. As we come towards the year of prayer quotes and ideas on this blog (broadly when we hit Week 52) it struck me that it is hard to pray for the things we love that don't easily sit in the categories for worship and ministry that we often see.

For me, that brings to mind whisky, reading, drawing, Airfix models, decent beer, walking in hills, driving entertaining cars, and sailing. Sailing, for me, is rest and worship, leisure and liturgy, something that connects me to God even as I appreciate the wonderful yet fallen world that God has created. And sailing, like life, is full of peril. And so it is with this in mind that I share this week's post: a prayer "to be used in storms at sea";

"O Most powerful and glorious Lord God, at whose command the winds blow, and lift up the waves of the sea, and who stillest the rage thereof: We thy creatures, but miserable sinners, do in this our great distress cry unto thee for help: Save, Lord, or else we perish. 

We confess, when we have been safe, and seen things all quiet about us, we have forgot thee our God, and refused to hearken to the still voice of thy word, and to obey thy commandments: But now we see, how terrible thou art in all thy works of wonder; the great God to be feared above all: And therefore we adore thy Divine Majesty, acknowledging thy power, and imploring thy goodness. 

Help, Lord, and save us for thy mercy's sake in Jesus Christ thy Son, our Lord.

Amen."

Sailing, for me, is analogous to living. As a race around buoys on a home-counties gravel-pit is fraught with trial and triumph, so is life as a Christian. As the ownership of a boat is mostly maintenance and barely joy, so is following Jesus through the storms of life.

And yet.

It is in these storms, in the mundane maintenance or the windless drifts to the next mark, straining with every sunburnt fibre just to heel (lean) the boat that inch more, that we see what God is doing. Life is not a long race to the finish, ending in our own victory. Life is more like a hard beat, thrashing upwind through piles of wet spray and aching limbs.

And yet.

It is in the normal that God meets us. In his word, that old written word and the majestic living Word, Jesus, that God meets us. And so this prayer, this old prayer, this prayer prayed across the world by sailors of duty and victims of storms, rings true for me.

And so we pray.

I wonder, are you a sailor? Do you journey somewhere, slightly out of control yet hopeful of the destination? Then this prayer is for you. This prayer resonates for me. I'd love to hear if it resonates for, or in, you. Leave a comment, drop me an email - prayer is open to us all...

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Don't forget to check out the previous posts in the series, featuring quotes from Tom Wright, John Wimber, Richard Foster and Don Carson, the great J. C. Ryle and theologians Alister McGrath and James K. A. Smith. Since then, I've shared quotes from Justin Welby, E.M. Bounds, Vineyard Pastor Ken Wilson, C. S. Lewis,  Norwegian O'Hallesby, Paul Miller, John Piper. Recently, we've heard Matthew Henry, Charles Finney, Andrew Murray, Tim Chester, Vaughan Roberts, Oliver O'Donovan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and John Bunyan. Then we got rather retro, with quotes from Church Fathers John Chrysostom and Tertullian, before returning to more recent thinkers with Rowan Williams, Mike Reeves and Peter Jackson and Chris Wright and Andrew Case, R. C. Sproul, and (representing a slight change of tack) the Westminster Confession. Recently we considered Karl Barth, and Donald Macleod, Mary Prokes,  J. C. Ryle (again!), Andrew Murray,  Martyn Lloyd Jones, Hudson Taylor, recently about Ffald-y-Brenin,  some of my own words, and my friend Nick Parish, Joyce Huggett. More recently I've shared a prayer of remembrance from the C of E, some of the words of Paul, an Anglican Prayer for Advent, Peter Lewis, Tim Keller, and most recently my friend Robin Ham.