Dear friends,

Humans can get used to just about anything.

Sometimes that’s helpful. Shoes feel good once you break them in.

Sometimes that’s harmful. Like when we become accustomed to injustice. 

Sometimes getting used to something means we miss out on beauty and goodness. We see something true again and again and again; until we don’t.

Familiar passages of Scripture can be like that. And none is more familiar than the Lord’s Prayer. Say it with me.

Our Father who art in Heav… 

Pause. 

Overcoming familiarity blindness takes intention. It takes humility; we must admit there is more to see than we’ve seen before. It takes slowing down; we must stoop to examine a brick in a road we’ve walked a thousand times.

And the road of the Lord’s Prayer is a glorious one that flows straight out of and into the heart of Jesus. 

For Monica and Jeremy Chambers, the Lord’s Prayer (and Psalm 23) went from rote to revelatory. They share the contagious joy of their journey on the Renovaré Podcast this week. 

I’ll leave you with a practice they mention. It’s called ​“festooning” the Lord’s Prayer. (Special thanks to Jan Johnson for introducing it.)

Saint Francis did this; C. S. Lewis, too. They’d pray phrase by phrase, amplifying and expanding and hanging words and ideas on the Master’s great prayer. 

We can do it too. Dress it up, strip it down, say it aloud, linger on a phrase, remix it… til our hearts own it. Something like this…

Our Father 
Near us and beyond us
May your name be treasured
May your life-giving way
Be the preference of my heart, my home, our world

And so on.

If this is something new to you and you’d like to try it, here’s a Google Doc worksheet. (Feel free to go to File > Make a Copy if you’d like to play around with it.)

Happy festooning,