Rough Altars Of Worship

From our Ignatian Prayer work today, comes this reminder and metaphor:

If you’re ending, or beginning a season, consider the altar you’ve built to God in that season’s coming or going. Reflect on the rough stones with which you’ve built this altar and its simple offering – your rough work, rough relationships, rough ideas and rough actions.

You built the altar with the stones available; worship finds its resource in the present people and pieces allotted to us. Allow the altar to be made of those rough and unhewn stones; allow it represent both the strength you’ve taken from the acts of God within that season, and the weakness in you and others that has been revealed in that same season.

Consider the altar, its shape and form, upon which you’ve placed your offering to God in this past season, or the one you are now in.

Take heart in the building, and take heart in the materials with which God has invited you to build.

AVAILABLE NOW

Sheltering Mercy and Endless Grace help us rediscover the rich treasures of the Psalms—through free-verse prayer renderings of their poems and hymns—as a guide to personal devotion and meditation. Sheltering Mercy helps the reader pray Psalms 1-75; Endless Grace leads in prayer through Psalms 76-150.

The church has always used the Psalms as part of its prayer life, and they have inspired countless other prayers. Each book contains 75 prayers drawn from the Book of Psalms, providing lyrical sketches of what authors Ryan Smith and Dan Wilt have seen, heard, and felt while sojourning there. Each prayer is a response to the Psalms written in harmony with Scripture. These prayers help us quiet our hearts before God and welcome us into a safe place amid the storms of life.

These artful, poetic, and classic devotional books are a perfect gift, and feature compelling stunning illustrations and hardcover binding, offering a fresh way to reflect on and pray the Psalms. Co-written with Ryan Whitaker Smith, Brazos Publishing.

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