The Anglican Communion is gathering in Salaam, Tanzania next week, a meeting that will end as Lent begins. This meeting began 30 years ago to fellowship, study and converse with one another, knowing that unity in the Church can only happen as people interact and get to know each other. I have always said that people can always communicate, but creating understanding requires more investment.
Here is a prayer that the Church is asking us all to pray and I found it very relevant, no matter what your flavor of Christianity:
Traditionally the season [Lent] has been one in which candidates prepared for baptism through prayer, fasting, and acts of mercy. This year, we might all constructively pray for greater awareness and understanding of the strangers around us, particularly those strangers whom we are not yet ready or able to call friends. That awareness can only come with our own greater investment in discovering the image of God in those strangers. It will require an attitude of humility, recognizing that we can not possibly know the fullness of God if we are unable to recognize his hand at work in unlikely persons or contexts. We might constructively fast from a desire to make assumptions about the motives of those strangers not yet become friends. And finally, we might constructively focus our passions on those in whom Christ is most evident –- the suffering, those on the margins, the forgotten, ignored, and overlooked of our world. And as we seek to serve that suffering servant made evident in our midst, we might reflect on what Jesus himself called us –- friends (John 15:15).
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