A Prayer for Those Who Promise Too Much

Lord Jesus, you told Peter that he would deny you, and he did not believe you. We are not so different. We make promises in the warmth of the evening and break them in the cold of the morning. We say we will follow you anywhere and then hesitate at the first threshold. We know ourselves less well than you know us.

Thank you that your foreknowledge of our failure did not cancel your love. You kept Peter's future open, and you keep ours open too. Forgive the vows we have broken this week. Forgive the ways we have relied on our own resolve rather than on your grace.

Give us a humbler kind of confidence. Let us trust you to hold us rather than trusting ourselves to hold on. When we fall, bring us quickly back to you, and when you restore us, let us go on to feed your sheep as Peter did. Make us people who love one another as you have loved us, so that the world may see something of you in the way we treat each other. We ask this in your name, who loved your own to the end. Amen.