What a privilege it was to gather together with other believers in Jackson and pray for our nation today.

This group of kids led us in singing I Surrender All and we all did something pretty unique today.....when we arrived we received some passages of scripture to read.  There was a man who blew a Shofar and we read our passage from the Old Testament....the sound of the trump again and then we read a passage from Psalms/Proverbs....the sound of the trump a third time and we read from the New Testament.  In the time we were there the entire Bible was read aloud collectively.  At first I thought that was a strange thing for us to do because we couldn't all hear everything, but as I participated I thought about how we would be praying all the prayers from the Bible and we would be declaring all the praises and how we would be doing it in a spirit of prayer and worship and I got pretty excited about it!

As I was leaving the gathering I had all these thoughts....that usually happens to me and I don't know how to verbalize them....but, I wondered who in that whole group of people was given the shortest verse to read.....many people kept reading for long lengths of time, but what if one person just got ....JESUS WEPT.....and then they stood there and listened to the rest of us declaring everything else. :)  That is a little funny....but it took me to a serious place.  I cannot say I am happy with the state of our nation... but I saw this picture of Jesus in my mind sitting on a hillside overlooking Jerusalem ....seeing the city and weeping over it.

It is so easy to get mad, frustrated, cynical, to mock, or to be sarcastic when we see continued injustice or unrighteousness, so I think the best place to start when we pray is with our own attitudes and in asking God to give us a spirit that is willing to weep over our nation as Jesus wept for Jerusalem.  

Then, remember HOPE....we never grieve as a people without HOPE.  Yesterday I posted the verse, My only hope is in You.....partly because I thought that may be a little clever with it being Star Wars Day which made me smile, but more importantly because I TRULY BELIEVE THAT.  We really can't find enduring hope anywhere else but in Christ, but the wonder of that statement is that GOD is limitless, so our hope is also limitless....it's not like a "man, this is my last hope so I hope this works" kind of thing.

The blasts from the Shofar reminded me of our HOPE....there will be a very important trump that will sound and what seems like an ending will actually be a glorious new beginning.