Morning Meditation: Thursday's Reflection

I wasn't prepared for the 6:00 alarm. The dark, the rain, the

snuggled in feeling each conspired to keep me in bed, but the activities of a full day urged me to get up. Normally, after making the bed and going up the stairs to the garret for my morning meditation time, I am awake. Not this morning. 

I push myself up the stairs and move my basket of current devotion materials next to me, just as I do each morning, but then I just sit there. My eyes closed. I could easily return to sleep. 

I wrestle with myself a bit. 
"Go ahead. Close your eyes for a few more minutes. What would that hurt?"
"Nope, you are up. Get on with the day. You know you will be glad you did."

Joyce Rupp and Mark Nepo, the authors of my current devotional materials, await my morning routine self, and I turn to today's prayer in Rupp's Fragments of Your Ancient Name. 
              I am the loom full of promise.
              You are the divine weaver.
              The colorful threads you merge
              Consist of my life's components…

This feels right, true, and I try to think for a moment about all the components of my life, but I am distracted, unfocused. I open Mark Nepo's The One Life We're Given and read a chapter, "Our Spirit Path." Even though it is a short chapter, I don't seem to be able to immerse myself in the message. I like the title, I tell myself, and know there is much in those words that could lead into deep reflection. But not this morning. Still, I underline these lines:
          How do you come alive and help keep the world
          together? How do you receive the flow of life that
          draws you to its center?…we're born with a dormant
          set of gifts that we need to inhabit in order to help each
          other become complete.

My gifts feels especially dormant this morning. I open my journal to write, as I do every morning, and the pen hovers over the page. I wait for what needs to be written, but today there is nothing. Finally, I open the small journal where I keep my ongoing prayer list. No day passes without adding some new name or issue to the list. Each day I lift up all the names, but not today.

Today I sit with one name--one family, actually. The family of Jacob Wetterling whose remains were found recently, his killer confessing where he had buried the 11 year old boy in 1989 when he was abducted. This is a story Minnesotans have lived with all these years, and I suspect there are few in the state today who do not ache with and for all those who love Jacob and have missed him all these years. At the press conference on Tuesday, Jacob's mother Patty said,
            He taught us how to live, how to love, how to be
            fair, how to be kind. He speaks to the world that he
            knew, that we all believe in. It is a world worth
            fighting for, His legacy will go on."

I may be tired this morning and unfocused. I may not feel ready for the activities of the day. I may not receive all that is available to me today, but all I really need to remember is to live, love, be fair and kind. 

An invitation
What is your prayer today? I would love to know.