Abundant Mercy

Summary

Psalm 51 is a prayer of confession. And in my experience, we don’t emphasize confession a lot, but I think confession can be very fertile ground.

Years ago, I encountered a form of prayer that I actually think might have changed my life. It was called a Welcome prayer. A simple form of the welcome prayer is “God, I feel X- whatever it is, and I welcome you into it with me.” Usually, I reserve this prayer for the big feelings: times of failure, mistakes, and shame; times of overwhelm at things I cannot manage or control. Generally, the realities of being human stuff. “God, I ask you to come into this space with me because I am overwhelmed and I need help.”

I say this prayer might have changed my life because I connect the prayer, and the time when I began to pray it regularly, with the beginning of a very different kind of faith journey for me. A journey in which I began to recognize my need for God. I didn’t just want to think about God theologically or to come to church mostly to see my community as I so often had. And these are good practices, but this time in my life took me deeper. It took me to a level of need and seeking and longing for the living God. The welcome prayer is an example of confession, which literally means “truth telling”.