τοῖς οὐρανοῖς Ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά

In my devotions this morning, I was reading “The Divine Conspiracy” by Dallas Willard. I was bumping along in Chapter 7, (it is a wonderfully dense book), and I was stopped in my tracks by the following excerpt about the holiness of G-d’s name and why the Savior underscored that we uniquely respect it:

“This request is based upon the deepest need of the human world. Human life is not about human life. Nothing will go right in it until the greatness and goodness of its source and governor is adequately grasped. His very name is then held in the highest possible regard. Until that is so, the human compass will always be pointing in the wrong direction, and individual lives as well as history as a whole will suffer from constant and fluctuating disorientation. Candidly, that is exactly the condition we find ourselves in.” (p258-259, HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007) http://harpercollins.com

These words rang through my heart; this, at its root, is why I choose to pray through history. All our offenses, human to human, are first an offense against The First Cause. I simply want to be on record that, whether acting as antagonists or protagonists of history, we have denied the Imago Dei (Image of G-d) of our fellow humans, therefore denied and offended The Name. Conversely, I want to make it a practice to record for my children that when individuals or societies reverence The Name, they indirectly revere, respect and better love His creation, and fellow man.