Note: As a personal, spiritual discipline, reviving my practice in the Lenten season of 2017, I revise the prayers I wrote then for each of the forty days of this Lent; each petition focusing on a theme, a concern weighing on my mind and heart or a care of my soul and spirit.
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On Kingdom to “Kin_dom”…
O Jesus, how I love You and Your Kingdom!
Yet, for years, oft I’ve prayed and preached using the word “kin_dom.” For, as I come to know You through Scripture and the daily revelations of Your Spirit, You alway are less monarchical and more relational. Alway less lording Your superiority over us and more sharing Your saving, Self-sacrificial grace with us. Alway less King and more Kin.
O Jesus, as I continue to follow You, You call me to be kin, too. To see all people as my kin of whate’er race or clan, culture or creed, philosophical disposition or political determination.
O Jesus, this is a hard calling that can get one killed, if not literally, then metaphorically, though no less truly in self-denial; dying to my self in the face of difference, at times, dissent…
But You already have demonstrated the extent to which Love loves: unto death.
So, O Jesus, in Your Name and for Your Sake, kin I am to and for the whole world.
Amen.
occasional observations of mind and heart, soul and spirit 
KIn to the world!! It doesn’t get much better than that Paul!! If we all saw each other and our world in this way, what a different world this would be…. I’ll save this one and pray it to come true!!
much love
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So long, I feel, I fear is our human walk to reach this goal, and then to move beyond its attainment to actualize, in our thinking and feeling, our intending and acting this manner of living, which I will term “universal kinship.”
Nevertheless – as I have come to believe and, thus, strive to behave – when a thing (in this case, universal kinship) is but a dream, rather than continue to ask, “Why not?”, I will act as if it already was so. In this way, in my small world where I live and move and have my being those with whom I interact will know that in me they are seen and known, welcomed and embraced, as the hymn says, “just as (they) are without one plea.” For that is how, or so I believe, God treats us.
Love you
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