Disturb us, Lord, when We are too pleased with ourselves, When our dreams have come true Because we dreamed too little, When we arrived safely Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when With the abundance of things we possess We have lost our thirst For the waters of life; Having fallen in love with life, We have ceased to dream of eternity And in our efforts to build a new earth, We have allowed our vision Of the new Heaven to dim.
Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, To venture on wilder seas Where storms will show Your mastery; Where losing sight of land, We shall find the stars. We ask you to push back The horizons of our hopes; And to push back the future In strength, courage, hope, and love.
This we ask in the name of our Captain, Who is Jesus Christ.
-Sir Francis Drake, 1577
How many of us enjoy the smooth ride… the calm waters… and the easy living? How many of us get complacent, even proud of ourselves when life is good? Who really wants to be disturbed when you can be pleased as punch, right?
The problem is, when you get smug in your comfort zone is when God rips off the band-aid. I’ve had the rug pulled out from under me so many times, that the prayer above is what I tend to pray nowadays. When the living is easy, I start to pray a little more.
Why? Because I’ve been there.
In my 20s, I fell in love with my life, ceased to dream of eternity, tried to build a new earth, and allowed my vision of the new Heaven to diminish. In short, my dreams were too small and I became completely self-satisfied. However, when the market crashed my overly-confident index also plummeted. It was only later that realized that I had lost everything because I had lost my thirst for God and allowed my hunger to be sated by money and material things. I stopped learning under His bold and vast tutelage and instead relied on my own limited knowledge.
So, now when I get too comfortable, I pray that God will push back on me, disturb my well-being, and remind me there is a horizon further than my dreams could possibly imagine and an eternity more worthy of contemplation and hope than the one I thought I had found.
