A Prayer About Quality Time

When relationships matter

TRIUNE GOD,

You have blessed me with wonderful relationships: family and friends who love me and neighbors, coworkers, and others who care about me. What a gift! Thank you. I don’t want to take these people for granted; yet often I breeze in and out of their lives without so much as a thought about how we are spending our time together. I know that the problem can be “quantity time”; that is, we need to be together more, and often I let other concerns and events get in the way. People are much more important than that. But I confess that even when I am with a loved one, I am sometimes only there physically; my mind and attention are occupied elsewhere. Even with strangers that is not the way I should act, for each one is your image-bearing, unique creation, whom you love. Help me, instead, Lord, to treat people as individuals, with respect, focusing on them and their needs and not my own, listening, and discussing the important issues of life, not just the superficial. These people and relationships matter.

Love each other with genuine affection, and take delight in honoring each other. Romans 12:10