My Family Prayer Book

 2026-09-20 Twenty-fifth Sunday of the year   Opening prayer Good and gracious Lord of the Vineyard, You call us at every hour of the day, and your generosity knows no measure of our merit. As we open our hearts to your word this day, free us from the envy that counts another's blessing as our loss, and from the pride that believes we have earned  your mercy, which you give freely. Teach us that our ways are not your ways, and our thoughts are not your thoughts. Help us to rejoice when your goodness falls on others as it falls on us - just like the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Teach us to trust that the last will be first, and the first will be last, in your unending love. Open our ears now to hear what you would say to us, and open our hearts to receive it with gratitude, and not with calculation. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.   Prayer for healing : Heavenly Father, we surrender our loved one and friends who are in need of healing to your lo...

  2023-Sep-24: The 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time     Isaiah 55:6-9 Isaiah 55:1-9, part of Deutero or Second Isaiah aka Book of Comfort, comprises most of the final hymn of the exilic portion of Isaiah, which invites exiles living outside of Judah in the sixth century B.C., at the dawn of Persian rule, to uproot themselves, move to a land their generation never knew, and reclaim their ancestral home. Despite the allowance of Cyrus and the Persian Empire for them to return, it was not a prosperous time. The city had not been rebuilt since its destruction by the Babylonians fifty years earlier, social and economic structures were weak, and there were struggles for the most desirable land between the returnees and those who had been in the land in the meantime. For me: the affirmation that God’s thoughts are not human thoughts, nor are human ways God’s ways  Psalms 145:2-3, 8-9, 17-18 Psalm 145, is called an individual hymn of praise that tells the story of the Israelites...