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A beautiful prayer about hindering and power

Lynne Baab • Friday October 30 2026

A beautiful prayer about hindering and power

Think with me for a moment about the word “hindered.” It’s used in the prayer I want to highlight this week. Synonyms include impeded, hampered, obstructed, inhibited, slowed down, and blocked. Think about your goals, dreams, and wishes. What hinders or blocks their fulfillment in your life?

Here are the two biggest things that hinder me:

1. The self-focus of my heart. I strongly dislike being bored, and I don’t want to listen or care once I lose interest in other people’s situations. Part of my challenge in caregiving for my beloved husband Dave was the many boring aspects.

Also related to my tendency toward self-focus, I often think I know the right way to do things, and I get irritated when people don’t do things my way.

Both my boredom and my belief that I can often see the right way to do things come partly from my selfishness, but these are also related to the analytical traits God gave me.

2. The aging of my body. Watching my husband Dave decline over a decade taught me that our bodies simply wear out, despite our best efforts to remain healthy. This has helped me accept the changes in my own body. I don’t have the energy I used to. I don’t think as quickly. My joints don’t work as well. I am hindered every day by limitations in my body and mind, largely caused by aging. Mostly not my fault, but still frustrating.

What are two or three things that hinder, hamper, impede, or block you? Pause right now tell God about them.

I also invite you to think about power. If God could give you power to do something, what would it be? I would love to have more energy. I would love to have the power to show love when I’m bored. I’d love to have more self-discipline in the physical world, especially in caring for my body and in keeping my home organized and tidy.

Here’s the prayer I want to highlight today:

“Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.”
—The Book of Common Prayer, collect for the third Sunday in Advent

Of the two things that hinder me most, one of them definitely relates to my sinfulness. I just don’t want to work hard at things that I find boring, even if the situation calls for love. And yet, God created me this way: highly cognitive, quick-thinking, and eager to dive deep into topics. Some of my lack of desire to love when bored comes from the way God made me.

Very few of the ways my body is declining with age come from my own sin.

Both of these things that hinder me come from the brokenness of our world, which is a result of sin. So, I am hindered by the result of sin in general as well as my own sins.

If I were writing the prayer, instead of the brilliant Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), I would add a list of things that hinder us. Cranmer focused only on our sins, definitely a hindrance but not the only one. I would include our unique gifts and weaknesses, our situation in life, our bodies, and the varied responsibilities and family relationships we cannot change.

In the Book of Common Prayer, each Sunday has a collect, a specific prayer for that day. Since this collect is used on the third Sunday of Advent, it comes 8 to 14 days before Christmas. Jesus’s birth was the first step in the defeat of sin and the coming of the Holy Spirit’s power. I love to think about the timing of this prayer, its connection to Jesus’ birth, and all the events set in motion by Jesus’s coming.

Holy One, help us identify the things that hinder us and pray wisely about them. We long for your power to come into our lives every day, and we need your guidance to use the Holy Spirit’s power for wise and holy ends.

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

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Next week: another beautiful prayer. Illustration by Dave Baab: Shag Point Lighthouse, New Zealand. It’s about 45 minutes north of Dunedin, where we lived for 11 years. If anyone loves birds, “shag” is the name for cormorant in New Zealand, and there 12 species in NZ. We saw them often.

Previous posts about power:



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