One of the girls in our home group brought us all a copy of this poem. It's one of my new favorite prayers!

Prayer of Sir Francis Drake

Disturb us, Lord, when We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.
We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

It is so easy to be complacent just being stagnant in our relationship with the Lord when we think we are doing fine on our own. One of my favorite verses of a Justin Barnard song is "When in the valley, I know I tend to cling to your hand, because I'm afraid when I can't see. But on the mountaintop I like to stand alone. That's when you break and rescue me." God's ideas always seem like an oxymoron to me. When you're weak, you're strong. When you're poor, you're rich. When you're free from the law, you're a slave to righteousness. Dead to sin, alive in Christ. I guess it's not surprising that this is no exception. The truth is that the times we think we are sitting pretty are usually the times when we are sinking deepest. Lord, don't let me get to a place where I am comfortable and everything seems so good that I forget how desperate I am for you. One of my favorite lines in that poem is "Disturb me, Lord, when I have arrived safely because I sailed too close to the shore." It reminds me of the song that this blog is based on, called "What do I know of holy?" One of the lines is "Where have I even stood but the shore along your ocean?" I don't want to be sitting on the shore dipping my pinky toe into the waters of life, when I could be submerged in them and pressing hard into the heart of the Lord. I don't want to be "safe," because of a lack of faith. I don't want to be so full of this world that I stop hungering for the Father's presence, or so caught up in building my own little world that I forget what it means to advance the kindgom. Father, disturb us. Who says the valley is a place of hopelessness? God doesn't...

"Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the desert
and speak tenderly to her.

There I will give her back her vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will sing as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came up out of Egypt.

"In that day," declares the LORD,
"you will call me 'my husband';
you will no longer call me 'my master. '

Hosea 2: 14-16