"Dear Lord,
I'm offering you this day.  Please help me to get through it.  Please keep the kids and my husband safe and help me get everything done that I have to do."

It's early in the morning and I'm up walking, saying what might pass for a morning prayer and trying to remember everything to be accomplished on each day's crowded agenda.  My intentions are good but the prayer is pretty poor most of the time.  It always sounds the same - a sort of moaning plea to God to protect my family and to help me juggle everything that needs to be accomplished.  At times I've felt like a broken record, repeatedly asking God to help the biggest family or work problem of the moment.

I've always felt kind of bad about this but today's readings helped me see my prayer in a new light.  The readings suggest that this mish-mash of disconnected prayer/conversation with God is okay even though it is on a low level and never changes much.  Both the Old Testament reading and Luke's Gospel  seem to be telling us the bring our daily concerns to God over and over and over.  As Jesus says in Luke, "Will not God then do justice to his chosen who call out to him day and night?  Will he delay long over them do you suppose?  I tell you he will give them swift justice."  The reading from Wisdom discusses the shelter that God has extended to his people and reminds us that He is our deliverer.

However, even as God seems to be giving us permission to bother him with our petty personal concerns, the readings also remind us to think of our responsibility to pray for justice in a broader context.  Are we ONLY concerned with ourselves and our lives?  What is our obligation to pray for those who are far less fortunate?  Can't we muster a moan on their behalf, even at 6 a.m.?

It might be interesting sometime to listen to ourselves praying.  Since I assume that many of us tend to say the same things over and over, what are we saying?  I wonder now if God really cared how Creighton Prep's cross country team did during the season.  I regularly and fervently invoked his blessings on it.  Was this really a matter of "justice?"  Probably not.  The same probably goes for my daughter's chemistry test and my big committee meeting.

So even as I take comfort in knowing that God at least understands the daily morning prayer he tends to get, I think I'll try to upgrade it just a bit to include a justice item or two every day.  It will also be a good idea to add a word or two of thanks daily.  In the final line of the Gospel, Jesus reminds us that just asking for and getting answers from God isn't enough.  "But when the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on the earth?"