Advent Prayers for you from the Faculty–Week Three

We invite you to take a moment, center yourself and read this prayer–as we pray with and for you.

This Advent Week three prayer was submitted by Dr. Nicole Symmonds, Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics

Focus Text: Zephaniah 3:17

The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.

God who is in our midst, we come to you this Advent season with more despair than we have hope, more hunger than we have food to eat, more month than we have money to cover the days, and more questions than we have answers. We come to you having lived through Advent seasons where we welcomed waiting with anticipation for our long-expected Jesus, to the season we are in now, which is peppered with anxiety because even if we don’t believe the waiting is in vain, we live in a world where there are people who cannot afford the luxury of waiting. Yet in all of this, we COME to you.

We come to you as a people who, although we know that the joy of the Lord is our strength, we sometimes have trouble believing it, and we certainly have difficulty seeing it these days. And so, we cry out to you, O God, not with perfect faith but with whatever fragments we can gather, hoping and praying that you meet us in our weariness and kindle in us even the tiniest spark of joy that we might recognize your presence still at work. Help us to remember that joy, unlike happiness, does not depend on our external circumstances but rises from knowing we are held, even in darkness, by hands that will not let us go.

To those among us who do know joy in this season – who have tasted and seen that the Lord is good – we ask that you would be gentle bearers of light, instruments of joy. Share not with triumph but with tenderness, remembering your own dark nights of the soul. Let your joy be like bread broken and offered, not hoarded but given freely, that all might be nourished. And may we all be each other’s keepers, kindling joy where it has been lost and keeping watch for joy where it may be found. May we do all these things in the name of Jesus, our long-expected one who is a hope, our faith, and now our joy.

In Jesus’ Name,

Amen

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