Update, Saturday, October 17, 2020

AS OUR SOULS MOVE”: A PRAYER ON AGING
Samuel N. Slie

Most loving and perpetually understanding and forgiving God, we lift our prayers of thanksgiving to you for renewal and sustenance in our aging. Bless us to receive and grow in self-respecting modesty, tough forgiving love, generosity, and without assuming self-righteousness. Bless all humanity to know Jesus Christ and the Church so that we may weather life’s successes and failures on our way to salvation.

May we experience each stage of aging as nobler and finer than those before it: childhood, adolescence, teenage, young adulthood, middle age, and the senior years, of giving and receiving wisdom and new learning from others. We pray for one another in our times of transitions (which are not always easy and not always short), especially when we relinquish the dynamics of earthly life so that our souls may be liberated. Here, O God, we gather inspiration from our Reformation brother Martin Luther who tells us, “My soul is silence, waiting all humble for God.”

Bless us, O God, to age with dignity and grace. We ourselves and others often say, “It isn’t easy to grow old.” When spirit, mind, and body show the effects of decades of aging, grant us the wisdom and grace to share and relinquish the social, family, economic, legal, and other initiatives to those who care about us and who can be trusted to bear those responsibilities with us and for us. Help us to accept who we are as our souls move from creation through earthly life to eternity. Gracious God who hears every prayer of every heart, hear us. May love, forgiveness, and the salvation promised in Christ Jesus receive us. AMEN

A Time For Prayer meets this morning at 10:00. Pastor Jim’s sermon in worship tomorrow is “On Not Declaring Victory Too Soon.”