Advent prayer: Open our eyes

Open our eyes, Lord,
especially if they are half shut
because we are tired of looking,
or half open
because we fear we see to much,
or bleared with tears
because yesterday and today and tomorrow
are filled with the same pain,
or contracted,
because we only look at what we want to see.

Open our eyes, Lord,
to gently scan the life we lead,
the home we have,
the world we inhabit,
and so to find,
among the gremlins and the greyness,
signs of hope we can fasten on and encourage.

Give us, whose eyes are dimmed by familiarity,
a bigger vision of what you can do
even with hopeless cases and lost causes
and people of limited ability.



Show us the world as in your sight,
riddled by debt, deceit and disbelief
yet also
shot through with possibility
for recover, renewal, redemption.



And lest we fail to distinguish vision from fantasy,
today, tomorrow, this week,
open our eyest to one person or one place,
where we - being even for a moment prophetic -
might identify and wean a potential in the waiting.


And with all this,
open our eyes, in yearning, for Jesus.


On the mountains,
in the cities,
through the corridors of power
and streets of despair.
to help, to heal,
to confront, to convert,
O come, O come, Immanuel.

- from Cloth for the Cradle by the Iona Community Wild Goose Worship Group
(emphasis mine)