There are many books in my library that are a direct result of the input of fellow book-loving friends. Prayers for a Privileged People by Walter Brueggeman is one such book, and i have Phil Aud to thank for his recommendation.

Here is one of the prayers from this brilliant book...

Sovereign

by Walter Brueggeman

We name you king, Lord, sovereign.
  We trust you, except
        sometimes we do not.
        We take matters into our own hands.

We fashion power and authority and sovereignty;
    enforced by law and bureaucracy and weapons,
        we think to make ourselves safe.
    And then learn, staggeringly,
        how insufficient is our product,
        how think is our law,
        how ineffective is our bureaucracy,
        how impotent our weapons.

We are driven back to you—
            your will,
            your purpose,
            your requirements:
                  care for land
                  care for neighbor
                  care for future.

We name you king, Lord, sovereign—
        so undemocratic!
    and in naming become aware of our status
        before you... loved, sent, summoned.
        We pray in the name of the loved, sent, summoned Jesus.

Walking away from a my Community Life Group, I was left feeling broken and very small... but in a good way. In the way that recognizes that God is God, and I am not.

Hours later, the one thing that my mind kept returning to was a prayer that I had originally found in a Chuck Swindoll devotional about a million years ago. It's from a book of puritan prayers, and is what my heart is echoing today...

Years ago when my grandmother, a prayer warrior, passed away, I felt a deep sadness that she was no longer here praying for her granddaughter, who was barely holding her life together at the time. Then, I happened upon this quote by E.M. Bounds, and my outlook, not only on prayer, but on our responsibility to pray, forever changed.

Mighty Force of Prayer
By E.M. Bounds
The more praying there is in the world, the better the world will be, the mightier the forces against evil everywhere. Prayer, in one phase of its operation, is a disinfectant and a preventative. It purifies the air; it destroys the contagion of evil. Prayer is no fitful, short-lived thing. It is no voice crying unheard and unheeded in the silence. It is a voice which goes into God’s ear, and it lives as long as God’s ear is open to holy pleas, as long as God’s heart is alive to holy things.

God shapes the world by prayer. Prayers are deathless. The lips that uttered them may be closed in death, the heart that felt them may have ceased to beat, but the prayers live before God, and God’s heart is set on them. Prayers outlive the lives of those who uttered them, outlive a generation, outlive an age, outlive a world.

That man is the most immortal who has done the most and the best praying. They are God’s heroes, God’s saints, God’s servants, God’s vicegerents. A man can pray better because of the prayers of the past; a man can live holier because of the prayers of the past. The man of many and acceptable prayers has done the truest and greatest service to the incoming generation. The prayers of God’s saints strengthen the unborn generation against the desolating waves of sin and evil.

Woe to the generation of sons who find their censers empty of the rich incense of prayer, whose fathers have been too busy or too unbelieving to pray. Perils inexpressible and consequences untold are their unhappy heritage. Fortunate are they whose fathers and mothers have left them a wealthy patrimony of prayer.

Where there is prayer there will be much of the Holy Spirit; where there is much of the Holy Spirit, there will be ever-increasing prayer.