Prayer - The Lord's Mercies

 We are often afflicted, O LORD, feeling faint and wanting to send our complaints up to You.  We know You hear us in our days of distress and yes, we are often impatient to get our requests answered.

You, oh Father God, have been from eternity and will continue to be for all eternity to come.  Days, Time itself, does not bind or confine You like it does us.  We know that in Your good timing our answers, reliefs, refreshing and revival will come, through You.  Help us, oh Lord, to learn patience and accept Your timing.

This was, and still is, the case for Zion.  The people of Zion had been captured and taken away from their sacred city.  They had been kept among captives in pagan lands for 70 years.  Some even lingered on after those years; perhaps too old to make the journey back to Zion.

That "away" time was a time of loneliness; of being derided and cursed; a time of "eating ashes like bread," tears mingled with drink.  On top of all this, they were feeling Your indignation and anger against their sins that perpetrated this affliction of their own making.  Oh how this was sand rubbed into open wounds.

Nevertheless, Lord, You did remember Your chosen people and You do remember us in our distresses and devastation even now; some of our own making and some, not.  May we make lists of how You have helped us through.  How we have been able to come back to our "Zion". How You took pity and have had compassion upon us, making us more whole again.  How You do not despise our prayers and desperate pleas for Your help, as did the people of Zion and writer of Psalm 102.

May these recordings be made so that our generation "not yet created" will come to praise You too, oh LORD.  We believe You look down upon us in tender loving care, establishing Your hand and guidance in our lives and will do so in our offspring and their peerage, as well, when they look up to You to do so.

Our lives wither away like grass.  Come and go, almost in a blink of an eye. Impress this upon us so we will not neglect to teach of Your goodness and the intervention You will have in a person's life when they cry out to You.  Impress this fleetingness of time upon us so we will be pro-active and purposeful in teaching those generations to come as if there is no tomorrow.  May each then, have an eternity with You in glory in time to come and dwell secure in the knowledge of Your goodness and care in the here and now.

                                                       ~ERC  March 2021~

Based on Psalm 102:1-28 ESV