God,
Grant me the SERENITY to accept the things that I cannot change,
The COURAGE to change the things that I can,
And the WISDOM to know the difference.
I’ve never started a newsletter with a prayer before. Usually, I end that way. But in this case, starting with this prayer made total sense.
Prayer is our missional focus for September; a month where we call everyone to pray to the Creator and hand over all of our cares and concerns in faith that it’s all in God’s loving hands.
But sometimes we really don’t know how to pray.
Sometimes we don’t know where to begin. So it seemed to make sense to use a prayer that I’m quite certain many of us in the field we are in would know; The serenity prayer.
Yes, I know that sometimes this prayer gets overused. But if we really pay attention to what it is saying, we recognize that it is a beautiful and powerful prayer.
Serenity.
Courage.
Wisdom.
These three things are hard to come by. Yet, these could make the work that we do a whole lot more manageable and make much more sense.
This work can be extremely frustrating.
Sometimes we wonder why governments make the decisions they make. Other times we are not sure how we go about walking through life with some people who come through our doors. And then there are times when we have no idea why our own organization makes such seemingly difficult to overcome decisions that make our work even harder.
It’s at times like these when we can feel helpless, and perhaps even hopeless. It’s then that we have no choice but to pray to the God who is bigger than all of that. And what better prayer to use than the serenity prayer? It captures pretty much everything that could possibly be going on in our hearts and minds.
So in this month of September, the month where we as The Salvation Army also focus on and set aside Sept. 24th to pray about worldwide human trafficking issues, let us remember the serenity prayer.
This will be another aid to help us continue to strive to be the hand of God in the heart of the city.
Peace
GOD, grant me the serenity
to accept the things
I cannot change,
Courage to change the
things I can, and the
wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardship as the
pathway to peace.
Taking, as He did, this
sinful world as it is,
not as I would have it.
Trusting that He will make
all things right if I
surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy
in this life, and supremely
happy with Him forever in
the next.
Amen
-Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr