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Good morning.

Looking back now, my only visit to Jerusalem was one I was completely unprepared for. It was 1997 and the summer of my ordination and first curacy getting under way and with flights booked for that August almost before I knew it I was right in the heart of the holy city and having my bags checked on my way to the Western or ‘wailing’ wall.

Growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s it wasn’t the security that phased me. I wasn’t expecting the men to the left, women to the right arrangement for lining up to pray, but what threw me more than anything else was the sudden dramatic sense of place and time, the realisation that I had come to one of the world’s most sacred sites of prayerat one of the key spiritual junctures of my life. A pen and scrap of paper in my hand, I had given zero thought to the prayer request I would very shortly be tucking into those hope-soaked ancient bricks.

Should I pray for myself, for my ministry, for my beloved Church of Ireland? Should I pray for my family and my friends, the people I most cared about or should it be a prayer simply of worship and self-offering? With so little time and rightly or wrongly I plumped for my troubled homeland. Not only was it a prayer that has since been answered but it continues to focus my mind helpfully on the question: if you had one prayer and one prayer only to lay before God, what would it be?

Father God, it’s good to talk. As we see in your Son the blessing of that loving two-way conversation, bring to our hearts the pains and problems of your world those situations where our prayer is needed most.

Amen.