Only just

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I always wondered about this one: “for what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.”

It’s so abstract - like maybe they’re not talking to God directly but making a general hinting statement. “Gosh, I would love it if someone thought to buy me flowers on my birthday…”

And like, “well, we’d like to be thankful, but you’d better make us thankful first - takes a lot of effort and energy, and we’re just not up to that kind of thing.”

How about just “thanks, God, for the food.”?

“Just” reminded me… (sorry!) I have long been irritated by prayers in which every other word is ‘just’ - as in “we just wanna bless you, Lord, Lord, you’ve just filled us with a wunnerful peace - Hallelujah!”, etc. I worked out a long time ago that it’s down to people starting to say something without knowing where it was going, and using extra words to pad it out to give the brain a chance to catch up with the mouth.

Then I spent a few years working as a prison chaplain, and found that conversations with the lads usually meant filtering the sentences out of a stream of f****ng and b**** - not that they were consciously swearing, or even swearing at me, but they were padding out the sentence to give he brain a chance to catch up with the mouth.

Then I put the two together, and imagined a prayer-meeting which went thus: “we f****ng wanna bless you, Lord, Lord, you’ve f****ng filled us with a wunnerful peace - f****!” I’ve never tried it, although I’m sure God wold be less roubled by it than most of my church folk - but whenever I hear that kind of prayer, I do feel like asking the “Do you know what you’ve just said to God…?”

I’m much too nice, though…