Jeanie Gushee - Yours Is the Day, Lord, Yours Is the Night: A Morning and Evening Prayer Book

Praise for Yours Is the Day, Lord, Yours Is the Night A prayer book for everyone! Weve desperately needed this brilliant compilation of authentic, personal prayers from across all ages and expressions of the Church. Profoundly rich in beauty, emotion, and theology, these prayers will nourish and deepen your soul. RICK WARREN
This is the prayer book I have wished for since I began praying. It will be my companion for years to come. Thank God for this book that will help all who read it to live with a serene and thankful heart, day by day. BRIAN MCLAREN, AUTHOR AND ACTIVIST (BRIANMCLAREN.NET)
If there is such a thing as a perfect prayer book, then Yours Is the Day,Lord, Yours Is the Night is that book.

Choosing with an unfailing sensitivity to both beauty and faithful practice, the Gushees have melded the Christian communions and traditions of two thousand years into one rich, melodious, and formative regimen for beginning and ending the Christian day. Their Introduction alone is worth the price of the book. PHYLLIS TICKLE, FOUNDING EDITOR [RET.], Publishers Weekly, RELIGION
This is an astonishing book. It not only orients the reader to devotional prayer in a way that is truly ecumenical, but rather than going for the least common denominator, it somehow manages to stay authentically and broadly connected to major figures and ideas in the tradition. A classic example of finding unity in diversity, it is a book that will serve as an important part of my own familys prayer life for years to come. CHARLES C. CHARLES C.

CAMOSY, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS, FORDHAM UNIVERSITY
A marvelous, diverse collection of prayers mined from the richest of all the major Christian traditions and centuries. A simple yet profound aid for ones personal devotional life. RONALD J. SIDER, PRESIDENT, EVANGELICALS FOR SOCIAL ACTION
2012 Jeanie Gushee and David P. Gushee All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc. Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com. Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version. 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Used by permission. All rights reserved. Images that appear in this book are copies of faithful photographic reproductions of original two-dimensional work of art, both woodcut and engraving on copper, that are in the public domain, created by Albrecht Drer (14711528) and found at Wikimedia Commons, commons.wikimedia.org. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yours is the day, Lord, yours is the night : a morning and evening prayer book / Jeanie Gushee and David P. Gushee, editors. cm. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8499-6448-0 (hardcover) 1. Prayers. 2. Devotional calendars. I.

Gushee, Jeanie. II. Gushee, David P., 1962 BV245.Y68 2012 242'.8dc23 2012024162 Printed in the United States of America 12 13 14 15 16 QG 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS





T his book offers a collection of morning and evening prayers, a different one for every day and night of the year, drawn from the ecumenical treasury of Christian prayer through the ages. We have organized them to reflect the seasons, the holidays, and the liturgical calendar of the Western Christian church. Drawing copiously from Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, it includes prayers from the Old Testament period and every century from the first century AD to 2012.Yours Is the Day, Lord, Yours Is the Night includes Christian prayers from every continent in the habitable world. It could well be the most ecumenical and comprehensive Christian prayer book to date.

As such, we hope it will not only inspire personal Christian devotion but help build a stronger sense of connectedness to Christian tradition and the church universal. (We are reminded of Christs prayer in John 17:11: Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are.)As a daily devotional, our prayer book is suitable for use by individuals, couples, families, prayer groups, and churches. We primarily designed it, though, with individuals in mind, to assist Christians in their daily prayer times with God. In some cases the language of the prayers has been altered from collectives (we, us) to singulars (I, me) in keeping with a primary purpose of serving the devotional lives of individuals.This book is not meant to serve as a substitute for spontaneous Christian prayers but as a springboard for them. We hope you will use these morning prayers as we doas a way to wake up and greet the new day with God, inspired by the noble aspirations of some of the heroes of the faith, followed by talking with God about the feelings in our own hearts. Remember that reading a prayer is not the same thing as praying one.

These prayers must find an echo in the intentions of your heart to be prayers to God. That may require reading them more than once.The evening prayers close the day, asking for Gods blessing as we lose ourselves in sleep. We find that they combine nicely with a personal prayer as we drift off, thanking God for good aspects of the day just concluded.The prayers vary in length, but the majority of them are fairly shortand we have abbreviated some for easier use. Some readers may also notice these prayers have not been edited for inclusive language about people and God. Our principle throughout this collection has been to allow these leaders from two thousand years of Christian tradition to speak in their own distinctive voices, so we have chosen not to alter ancient Christian prayers to achieve contemporary gender-neutral norms.Ancient prayers were written in Greek, Latin, and other languages and sometimes come down through the centuries to us in several different forms. This is why a prayer we cite may be available to you in a different form in other publications.It is our hope that this book will assist Christians in their daily prayers for a lifetime.

The Christian liturgical calendar includes a few holy days that vary from year to year as to the date on which they fall. (Ash Wednesday, for example, begins the Lenten season some years in February, other years in March. Advent, also, arrives sometimes in late November, other years in December.) In whatever year you are praying through this daybook, we suggest that on Ash Wednesday, the days of Holy Week, Easter week, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, and the first Sunday of Advent, you flip over to the prayers selected for those days. The next day, return to the prayer in the book appropriate for the calendar day.The apostle Paul instructed followers to pray without ceasing (1 Thess. 5:17). It is our prayer for this book that you will use it to honor God and seek Him in prayer each morning and nighttime of the year, each year of your life.