A Liturgy for Those Whose Plans Did Not Go How They Thought It Would

The following is a liturgy I crafted by combining and adapting elements from Douglas McKelvey’s Liturgy for the Death of a Dream and Liturgy for Those Who Have Not Done Great Things for God from the book Every Moment Holy.

I had the opportunity to give a sermon during a Spring Break trip for Campus Christian Fellowship at Truman on my experience with graduate school applications and rejections, and I closed the sermon out with this liturgy. I thought it may be useful to others that have experienced similar feelings as I have.

How many times have we been told, O Christ, by well-meaning people, that it is our destiny and our charge to go out into the world and do great things for You? How many times in response have we prayed that You might use us mightily for the work of Your kingdom? 

O Christ, we bring to you now the fragments of our former dreams, the shards of some shattered image of life as we once thought it would be.

What we so wanted has not come to pass. Those dreams could not sustain us, but we know that You are Lord in the midst of it all. Our disappointments reveal the ways we have quietly demanded our plans should play out: free of conflict, pain, and want. So let these disappointments do their work, that they may unmask all false hopes.

O Children of God, listen well, and be comforted. He has never judged us unfit for any service He has called us to. And if we would pray to do great things for You, God, may we pray such prayers without regard for how they should be answered.

For when You answer, O Lord, it will not be on our terms. For it is not we that will do any great thing for you, God, but You laboring in us and through us to greatly accomplish Your own good purposes. Our histories bear the fingerprints of grace, and though we could not always trace evidence of your presence, you remained at work in us.

You, Lord, will bring all things right in Your way and in Your time. Let us be content in the current station You have appointed to us, and may we be ever ready to move at the impulse of Your love. May we tend well to the things that are before us, however humble they may be, and may You lead us in time to other good works You have appointed for us.

Not our dreams, O Lord, not our dreams, but Yours, be done. Amen.

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