Praying for trouble

Last weekend I stood on stones laid by the First People two thousand years ago on a bluff in what is now called Montana. Larry and Anki McEvoy are the current human owners of these five square miles. They have placed most of it into a conservation reserve so that it might again welcome Elk and humans who wish to live with them. I was there as one of a dozen of the Stakeholder Health tribe, under Larry’s teaching about Epidemic Leadership. We were still dizzy from the COVID years, but looking for a way to give our lives away to something that might be worthy of the miracles our little planet offers up every day and to every generation. The only way to participate in such wonder is to give it away, of course.

I thought of of the Reverend Congressman John Lewis and the prayer he inspired in me as I reflected on his life. It’s better said than read. You can hear it by clicking on the picture of my by our beehives above.

Good Trouble

God of anger, fire, trouble and cry,

Kindle us, your willing embers of the world that needs a cleansing fire. We are yours to risk, eager for fresh air beyond the safe spaces. We love your street, and concrete grit. We love the stride and the heft of things worth doing, unafraid of conflict.

Let us not hold your energy lightly, unexamined and unwashed of pride. Let us not waste your hope by tethering it to our short-ranging vision. Let us not waste voice and language by limiting it to our cleverness.

Tune our ears to those hardest to hear, the ones we find annoying and inconvenient. Especially help us hear the ones that embarrass our proper friends, just as You bothered them with tax collectors, working women and the rich. You were rejected by family, nearly thrown off a cliff by neighbors. Complicate our sense of connection and draw us into the tangled humanity You have made so wonderfully and inconveniently complex.

And then, after we sense the breadth of your impossibly wide family, let us speak with simplicity of mercy and justice in kindhearted firmness.

Protect us last. Put our bodies in the way of those who would harm the poor and despised; let the bruises intended for the weak fall on us; let the venom aimed at the despised be ours. Spend us as You have spent yourself.

We know in resistance we find release; in giving, all gain. For life finds a way where we let it flow through us into lives parched for mercy, aching for justice, despairing of peace. May our young be brave. Our families raising up new prophets as our old ones take the risks reserved for those who have lived enough to give it all away.

Make our lives a protest against the lie that You have not created enough food, space and freedom to go around for all your children. We deny with generous lives the lie that You failed to design a world that might work for us all. May our kind lives protest the lie that we must narrow our hope to only those who pray like us, look like us and talk like us. May our lack of anxiety protest the bitter penury that shrinks your mercy into a fist.

Surely it is your voice that speaks of a time when your promises will be realized, the weapons laid down, the rich with the poor eating together, lamb and honeybee, Baptist and Buddhist, Anglican and Atheist quiet in wonder at how great Thou art, how blessed we are.

May it be.

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The prayer is from God and the People: Prayers for a Newer New Awakening, published by Stakeholder Press. Available on Amazon here.

Larry McEvoy’s book, Epidemic Leadership: How to Lead Infectiously in the Era of Big Problems, is here.

Thank you to Dora Barilla, Larry and Anki McEvoy, Arvind Singhal, Bobby Milstein, Colleen Flynn, Anna Creegan, Kevin Barnett, Teresa Cutts, Monte Roulier, Terry Williams, Rick Rawson, Lauran Hardin and Tom Peterson, for the experience.