a blessing for when you want to change

God, I carry around this incompleteness,
this drive for fulfillment that always seems just around the corner.
If only I could get it together and find my true calling,
my real passion, or the right plan.

God, help me, guide me. What am I missing?

Blessed are we who strive earnestly
to change ourselves and the world around us,
but feel the drag and pull of what won’t budge,
the weight of all our limited and frail humanity.
We carry it with us.

Blessed are we, the hungry,
in lives that are both too much and not enough,
willing to tell the truth to ourselves and to each other,
that we languish here…

in “what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—
that what we hunger for more than anything else, is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.” (Frederick Buechner)

To be fully known, and fully loved, in all our humanity.
And that is a God-sized project.

Blessed are we, thankful that we can live
our human-sized lives in the glad company of the vulnerable and the broken,
the imperfect made whole in the love of God, through Jesus Christ.

Maybe it’s right to be hungry. And stay that way.

*From our new book of blessings, THE LIVES WE ACTUALLY HAVE (2/14/23)