“For at last I believe

 
 life itself is a prayer,

and the prayers we say

      shape
the lives we live,

just as the lives we
live

      shape
the prayers we say;

and it all shapes the
kin(g)dom

      which
expresses itself in and among us,

            and for which we are guerrillas.”

                  ~Ted Loder,
Guerrillas of Grace 

This morning I was searching
through some prayer books in preparation for devotions for a meeting.
I began looking through this book of prayers by Ted Loder which I hadn’t
picked up for some time. I had forgotten how beautiful the prayers were
and was once again struck by the challenging title and some of the very
challenging prayers within. 

Have you every thought of yourself
as a ‘guerrilla’? It is a startling label, isn’t it? Guerrilla
is something one associates with war, with countries far from our shores,
with chaos and the rag tag nature of conflicts uncontrolled. To be a
guerrilla is to be ‘a member of an irregular armed force that fights
a stronger force by sabotage and harassment.’ Wow!  

And yet when I look at the
ways in which Loder uses the term in relationship to prayer, it all
makes sense. To see our whole lives as prayer…communion with the Holy…is
to certainly live an irregular life. To allow our prayer to shape our
lives and lives to shape our prayer calls on us to arm ourselves with
a deep, abiding sense of God’s presence in every movement we make,
from the most mundane to the most significant. To be present to that
prayerful living means we go against a strong force of all that will
distract us, all that will sell itself to us as ‘more important’.
To be a guerrilla of grace is to sabotage the spaces of fear and despair
by offering compassion and hope.  To be a guerrilla of grace is
to upset the apple cart of injustice through the harassment of justice
and liberation. 

As I read the scriptures, it
seems to me Jesus was just such a guerrilla, always throwing the mirror
up in the faces of those who would keep people from living into the
fullness God had prepared for them. In that spirit, how can we do any
less than continue to shape the prayer of our lives, and the life of
our prayer, into an ever unfolding glimpse of the peacable kin(g)dom?