Previously on All I Can’t Leave Unsaid…

“Take care of your blog,” Robin Rendle wrote. 

“Blogging changed my life,” my friend Hugh Hollowell, Jr. wrote in a recent newsletter.

Inspired by them I’ve returned to this space… one two three and a half weeks later I’m still trying to get this post up. Ugh. Such is life here at All I Can’t Leave Unsaid—still the most ironically named site ever.

The silly part about all the inactivity here is that I’m creating content (kinda hate myself for using that phrase, but it is apt) in plenty of other places. Often with the intent of posting it here too, but that just hasn’t happened. “Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.” [sigh]

But! Correcting that…again today. As promised! “Look at [me] go!” Yesterday was about the blogging I do for Coffee ‘n’ Capes, the podcast/coffee-and-comics business I co-own.

Today is about the, ahem, content I create for my blog on the website for the church where I serve as one of the pastors, Woodridge United Methodist Church.

I don’t write there very often–but still more frequently than I do here. Like this post from September that was a follow up to my sermon that previous Sunday. The scripture text for the day was from Matthew 6, which includes Jesus’ instructions on prayer. Those instructions eventually morphed into what is commonly known as The Lord’s Prayer (aka the “Our Father”):

We are so blessed to have multiple gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth, life, teaching, death, and resurrection. Our four canonical gospels provide us with widely varying stories and details about Jesus. So widely varying that some stories as presented in one gospel are completely incompatible with the other gospels. Not only is that not a bad situation in which to find ourselves–it is how it should be! It is freeing to know that God’s love is so expansive that it could never be encapsulated into one singular version of one particular story. That also goes for ‘The Lord’s Prayer’: there is no, one, singular way to formulate that prayer.

Here’s an example that the Rev. Dr. Wilda Gafney included this version of the prayer in her commentary on Matthew 6 in her book, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year W, which we are using regularly. This version of the prayer was written by The Rev. Yolanda M. Norton:

Our Mother, 
who is in heaven and within us, 
we call upon your names. 
Your wisdom come. 
Your will be done, in all the spaces in which you dwell. 
Give us each day sustenance and perseverance. 
Remind us of our limits as we give grace to the limits of others. 
Separate us from the temptation of empire, 
and deliver us into community.
For you are the dwelling place within us, 
the empowerment around us, 
and the celebration among us, now and forever. Amen.

I hope this version unlocks some awe, wonder, and curiosity in your prayer routines. 

Check back tomorrow for my most recent sermon…or to laugh at me if I don’t get that post done!