I seem to recall a red work book from grade school called “Think and Do.”

The Collect of the Day (Prayer of the Day) this week, is a think and do prayer:

We begin with the acclamation, “O God, the giver of all that is good…,” We aren’t given time to say, “Thank you, Lord” or “Hey, can we talk about this?” We quickly move to a request.  “By your holy inspiration grant that we may think those things that are right and by your merciful guiding accomplish them.”  We need God’s sanctified breath to get our heads on straight and think rightly.  Once God gets us going in the right direction, then we need his help in doing the right things.

These Collect Prayers are from of old, so the need for thinking and doing rightly has been our problem for a long time.  And yet what does God do?    God doesn’t wait for us to get our act together. Instead, God keeps giving us all the good we have in our lives and keeps pushing us in the right directions through his holy breath.

As is the usual case we pray our requests to our gift giving God, “through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.”

As the work book from long ago suggested, “Think and Do.”