I wrote the first verse in 1999, while I was working at Calvin College with the LOFT (Living Our Faith Together) services, a student-led Sunday night worship service (see 535). A wonderful liturgical habit had developed there: we concluded each Sunday evening service singing a biblical blessing and doxology: “My Friends, May You Grow in Grace.” I wanted us to develop a parallel ritual/habit for the opening of worship—something that would immediately remind us of our purpose for gathering and could sustain repeated use, able to transition into something more up-tempo or down-tempo. I wrote the first verse to meet that need.
 
Years later, when I begin working at Western Theological Seminary, our daily services of morning prayer were likewise in need of an initiating song—something that had the character of invocation, something sung that would bring us from our own individual concerns and join us together in heart and mind and breath, something that would connect us to the daily prayer tradition of the church. I tweaked the traditional morning prayer versicles from Psalm 51 and Lamentations 3:22-23 to fit the tune I’d written earlier.
 
The following year, I did the same sort of thing, composing verses to be sung when celebrating the Lord’s Supper. We commune weekly at Western Theological Seminary, and value the poetry and theology of the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving—a prayer, which, like a sung grace before a family meal, bathes the feast in gratitude. But I learned through my teaching that many of our students experienced the Great Prayer when spoken from a prayer book or printed liturgy as an inexplicably “necessary” series of disconnected ‘talky’ bits, interrupted by congregational talky bits.The prayer’s internal logic and Trinitarian structure were unappreciated.The coherence is underscored by inviting the musicians to play quietly during the three sections of prayer spoken by the presider, and the structure is made plain by setting each congregational response (Preface/Sursum Corda, Sanctus/Benedictus, Memorial Acclamation, and Great Amen) to the same basic tune.