My prayer for a class reunion

(and yet they keep inviting me back)

I’m offering a prayer before lunch at my 50th high school class reunion later this week and decided to look up a prayer I offered at my 30th college reunion…

Dear God,

We thank you for all that you have given us.  We are, without a doubt, blessed people.  We were blessed to have been students at this school, and we are blessed to be here 30 years later.

We thank you for the memories, especially the ones that seem to grow better over the years.  We thank you for the memories we have of this institution, and of the fine people we came to know here—not only fellow students, but the dedicated servants who taught us and cared for us and brought us to the point of commencement.

We thank you for the gifts you have given us, which—at some points in our lives more than at others—we have actually tried to develop.  We thank you for hips and knees and other parts that have served us and have miraculously survived the wear and tear of all the years.  We thank you for wrinkles and the many shades of hair color present tonight.  There are some here tonight who are thankful to have any hair at all.  Help us to see our age as still another way to honor you and bless the ones we love.

Please forgive us, not only for the mistakes we made all those years ago when we were students, but also for the little lies we tell tonight.  You know the truth about us, and it’s never as flattering as we make it sound.

God, for all of our successes and failures, our joys and defeats, our good times and bad, we give you thanks.  And we trust that you have still more in store for us—perhaps the best times of all.

We pray all of this in the name of the one who saved us, even as we thought we were doing it all ourselves, Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.