A Sunday Morning Prayer for a Withered Garden

It's Sunday morning again in America and I wake early to thoughts of individuals I've met at the church we've made home for the year.

Lord, their souls are languishing.

Almost to a person, I've met my peers in American church, and they seem to have withered souls. Burned out and resigned. Am I reading too much into it or is this discernment?

They all speak of having once been 'really involved,' but now they're not. As if it were a club. No one talks in language that has any hint of a Spiritual pulse that the living God indwells them. They seem resigned to live on the surface of their spiritual life while You, the depths of You, is calling to what is deep in them...and their children.

I wonder how much of our Spiritual lives are mirrored in our marriages. We are, as a church, the Bride of Christ, and these peers I'm sure were once passionate and full of hope in their walks with You. But now, down the road a dozen or more years, the experiences of life, and the affairs of the world, and the responsibilities of raising the children have all but killed our libido and turned our date nights into a chance to synch our planners.

And this leads me to wonder, how Lord are they able to impart the idea of walking intimately with you to their children? Praying with my children in the evenings as they go to bed is such a sweet time in our family's spiritual life, but I know that most others don't have this ritual past pre-school, and then church is something we go to on Sunday out of duty, or ritual, or habit. It's an "ought to." That's not going to win the children to a life of following you.

Lord, what am I to do about it?

I need fellowship. I need encouragement. I need You. I need them.

I refuse to give up and give in to middle aged spiritual languishing. I've come back to USA thinking this was a place to be fertilized and nurtured and now I'm grieving to find such a sorry state of what's passed off for fellowship and worship among Christians. With all our websites, and magazines, and infrastructure for communication, people don't really seem intimate with one another, or intimate with You. You've placed in me pastoral gifts that grieve for them but I'm not sure what to do about it except come to you...and type this prayer. For me writing always gets it off my chest. You take it and lead me in what I should do with this sadness, and this yearning to help, this conviction that it shouldn't be this way.