Morning Prayer

Quickened by the Spirit's grace
All Your holy will to trace
While we daily search Your Word,
Wisdom true impart, O God.

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life--your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life--and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
--Romans 12:1-2, The Message

"In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love."
-- Mother Teresa

O God, you are the King eternal. At the beginning of creations you divided the day from the night and turned the shadow of death into the morning:
God I aske that you drive far away from me all wrong desires, incline my hearts to keep your law, and guide my feet into the way of love and peace. And then, having done your will with cheerfulness while it was day, make it so that when the night falls, allow me to rejoice and give you thanks in all things. In everyday life help me to live as you would will it -- help me to show great love in small things. I pray for those people who lie heavy on my heart this morning. I pray for those who show one side to the church and another to the world. I pray for those whom they have hurt. Lord, I don't want to be a ice cream bar with the chocolate just on the outside -- a shell of piety for the world to see. I want it worked through my entire life so that in all I do and in all I say and in all that I am, I am yours through and through. In the name of you Beloved Son, Amen.