Disturb us, Lord

I am inordinately surprised to discover a prayer by Francis Drake which firstly I hadn't come across before and secondly that is so pious [him having been a privateer and all], courtesy of Maggi Dawn. It goes like this.

Disturb us, Lord,

when we are too well pleased with ourselves;

when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little;

when we arrive 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 push back the horizons of our hopes,

and to push us in the future with strength, courage, hope and love..."



I find myself warming to this prayer greatly encouraging and resonating with the life coaching bit of me: the recognition that we are probably capable of more than we dare to dream and that we choose safety over the risk of kin_dom living.

I find in it echoes of Jesus' words about losing life to gain it and the warning that if we try ot hold on to things, especially our own life/soul we run a dire risk of losing the very thing we try to grasp so tightly. In so doing this prayer makes us aware of one link between the teaching of Christ and life-coaching: daring more and disturbing the comfortable.



I like too the extended sea-faring metaphor which is both challenging and yet comforting: putting out out of sight of land yet ... there will be stars to guide; we need only trust and go.



It is a bold prayer to ask that the horizen of our hopes be pushed back; but often that's just what I/we need. We get so used to making do, being realistic, cutting our cloth ... that it becomes a habit and we lose sight of the possibilities that sometimes our dreams are of God and they are there to invite us to transcend the limitations.



Admittedly sometimes we need the wisdom and humility to make do, be 'realistic' and limit our ambitions but let's not confuse that with a law of the universe and think that always such self-limitation is the Christian way. Sometimes it is but sometimes the call of God is to adventure and to growth beyond those limits. Our task and the task of spiritual direction /soul friendship /spiritual-life coaching is to understand which is which.



There is a time for everything. Sometimes it is time to adventure for the Love of God. Sometimes it is time to mourn and stay put so that healing can take place and so that we do not set off in a frame of mind that will turn our adventure with God into dust and ashes, depression and despair. Sometimes adventuring can be running away from important 'housekeeping'. This then, is not a prayer for all seasons; but for some seasons it is THE prayer.



Certainly I am currently hearing this as a reinforcement of something that my mum said to me not long back which while not spot on linked strongly to something along these lines. Have I settled to comfortably; do I need to push the door a bit harder? Quite probably. It is certainly too, a reminder of the exciting and joyous things in our discipleship: dreaming of eternity the water of Life, a renewed creation and acting in the good of them.

maggi dawn: Disturb us, Lord: