I’ve been practicing Lectio Devina lately and was taken aback this morning by the power of the word “our.” I decided to go through the Lord’s Prayer over the next few days and began with:
Our Father who is in heaven.” Matthew 6:9 NASB
I tend to get ahead of myself, so I imagined before I went into prayer, that “Father” would most likely be the word God would bring to me as I prayed. For those unfamiliar with Lectio Divina, it’s a Benedictine practice that involves reading and rereading a short passage until one word becomes clear. It literally means divine, or sacred, reading.
Lectio Divina allows the living Word of God to speak to the heart as the person praying digests each word in the selected scripture. One word will come to the surface, and God will lead the person to a greater understanding of that one word.
It seemed obvious to me that “Father” would be the word because it was the most important word as far as I could tell. As always, God turned the obvious around and left my head and heart spinning in the process. I was delighted to find that “Our” was to be the focus of my prayer this morning.
I repeated the scripture over and over again, emphasizing the word “Our.” My body and spirit become still as I chewed upon the tiny word. The more I chewed, the more it became clear that “Our” opened an important door in Christ’s powerful prayer.
In uttering “Our” to the disciples, he included them in God’s kingdom. They became, and we become God’s children. I quickly smiled and repented not giving that simple plural possessive pronoun its due. The whole of the Good News Christ brought into the world is contained in that tiny, seemingly insignificant, word.
The power of “Our” became crystal clear after praying, and I had to laugh as God made it clear that this “Our” was more inclusive than possessive 😊 God gave the image of my smallest granddaughter, who will be two in a few weeks, taking ownership of all in her reach. Like her sisters before her and two-year-olds around the world, she is fascinated by another little possessive pronoun. Mine!! She has a little munchkin voice until she uses that word!
Her voice deepens, and her face becomes ready for battle when she sees something new and says, “Mine!” I smile when she says it, but I also tell her that something isn’t hers if it doesn’t belong to her. I have a little seal I bought in San Francisco that makes a loud noise when you squeeze it, and she likes it a lot. She held it tightly, pulled it to her side, and said, “Mine!” in her deepest I mean it voice. I told her nicely that it belonged to me, but I would share it with her. She seemed okay with that as long as she could still hold on to it.
Too often, Christians take a two-year-old attitude when it comes to Christ. He shared as no one ever has, and His love was never clearer than in the first little word of the prayer He taught us all to pray.
journeywithgigi 
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