Dear God:
I thank You for enabling me to have this relationship with You.
It brings me great comfort and joy to be able to pray to You and ask for Your help, Your blessings, and Your guidance.
I thank You for the gifts and characteristics that You have given me that help me to be more like Jesus and to better manage my life:
for love and for peace and for joy;
for goodness and for holiness;
for strength and for courage;
for confidence and for leadership;
for honesty and for integrity;
for compassion and for brotherhood;
for responsibleness, for trust, for trustworthiness, and for trustfulness, mixed with the appropriate level of skepticism;
for health and for humor;
for sincerity and serenity;
for stick-to-it-iveness and for grace;
for knowledge and for humbleness;
for initiative and for patience;
for wisdom and for intelligence;
for freedom from fear; freedom from despair; freedom from jealousy; freedom from laziness; freedom from cowardice; freedom from loneliness; freedom from unwarranted guilt and freedom from un-needed anxiety;
and for all the gifts and characteristics that you have given me that help me to be more like Jesus and to better manage my life.
I thank You also for Your help in meeting my short-term goals and obligations and for helping me to recognize and work towards my longer-term goals and for helping me to accomplish those long-term goals.
I thank You for Your help with my daily interactions and communications — for helping me to be an effective communicator and a good listener and for helping those I am interacting with to be effective communicators and good listeners, as well.
I thank You for helping me to stay in the moment and to recognize the impacts of what I am communicating to others, either directly or indirectly, so that we might better understand each other and, together, build a resolution that is best for all.
I thank You for helping me to communicate the most appropriate level and amount of information, especially when dealing with complex and sensitive information and for helping me to recognize those occasions where the most appropriate amount of information is no information at all and for helping me to communicate exactly that in those situations.
I thank You for helping me to take the initiative, make the contacts needed, and take the actions required, in order to fulfill your goals, my goals, the goals of my family, the goals of my employers, and the goals of the organizations of which I am a part.
I thank You for Your help with each of these items: the gifts and characteristics You’ve given me that help me to be more like Jesus and to better manage my life; my long-term and short-term goals and obligations; and my daily interactions and communications, as well as with my marital and family relationships and my health and fitness. I pray for your continued assistance with each of these items.
I thank You and I praise You.
Amen.
Notes:
I had originally titled this “A Bureaucrat’s Prayer,” but as I thought about it, I realized that the skills in communications, leadership, and empathy that I seek to employ and improve upon are necessary skills for all professions who interact with their fellow human beings.
I was raised Catholic and still practice in fits and starts. You’ll find the prayer has a Christian bent as a result. I believe, however, that the ideas presented are universal and encourage readers of other faiths who like these ideas and find them helpful or comforting to incorporate those portions they like into their own personal prayers.