Thy Kingdom Come

I wrote about this in a previous posting in French. I thought I might share it in English as well.

I was a facilitator in a faith-sharing group made up of 12 adults from various fields of life. The group had been meeting on a weekly basis for over a year.  As facilitator it was up to me to choose a topic for the evening.  Since the Sunday readings for several weeks at that time mentioned the Kingdom of God, I decided I would focus on that as a theme. A week before the session I was to facilitate, I asked the participants to answer the following question: When you pray the Lord’s prayer and you come to “Thy Kingdom come”, what is it exactly that you mean when you pray this phrase? I asked them to take 5 minutes to write down their answer without giving their names. I simply added that these answers would help me prepare the next session.
  
     I was not quite sure what I would do with these answers until I read them.  As I went through them I realize how much the prayer had taken root in each of those persons. Year after year they had been praying, “Thy Kingdom come”. Some of the members of the group were over 80 years old and they certainly must have repeated this phrase thousands upon thousands of times.  I realized as I read their comments how much of their own life experience they had pored over time into this phrase. But I could also feel that something else had transpired in their hearts as they prayed. I felt a sense of awe as I perceived that the words of the prayer had illuminated their hearts so that it contained not only their own thoughts of the Kingdom, but also those of the Father. It was as if the prayer they repeated gave birth to the very dream of God in their hearts, God’s own dream of the Kingdom had become theirs.

I made a collage of excerpts from the written responses of the participants and I read it as a prayer at the beginning of our next faith-sharing group meeting. It was a powerful prayer!