Note: As a personal, spiritual discipline, reviving my practice in the Lenten season of 2017, I revise the prayers I wrote then for each of the forty days of this Lent; each petition focusing on a theme, a concern weighing on my mind and heart or a care of my soul and spirit.
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On self-knowledge, self-loathing, & self-love, again (with “alway”)…
O my Lord, I awakened this morning with this (deeper?) insight into a paradox of Your Being: The unconditionality of Your Love for me alway allows me, in my free-will, to seek my own way and ways to love me. Yet alway I fail. That, too, You allow.
Through this yet another paradox of the shattered mirror of my constant inability, this life-long debility to love my self may I see You more clearly. So that I – alway confident of Your Love, which alway is greater than the fault and guilt of my failure, day by day, more and more, until alway – surrender my judgment of myself to You.
Amen.
occasional observations of mind and heart, soul and spirit 
Surrendering judgment!! This is so key in our daily lives I believe!!! Especially in today’s world!! I’m
focusing on this prayer today and am so thankful for it!!
As the weekend starts, I’m wishing you much success in your new position!! I think it’s going to be wonderful for you and that your new congregants will love and embrace you unconditionally. I’ve also been praying for the folks at Laurens so that they can begin to heal from the grief of losing you as their Rector.
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Aye, surrender unto the Lord is key. I agree.
Funny, not hilarious, but rather ironic how life, sometimes, runs in circles. As I reflect, this business, this movement of our human surrender unto the will and way of the Lord was a central, perhaps, the central element of my preaching and teaching in the early 1980s when I was the rector of Calvary Church, Charleston. On immediate and deeper self-reflection, it is clearer to me that I, at that time, was wrestling with mine own surrender to God. Thus, in coming full circle, doubtless, I think, I believe, I, being as arrogantly self-willed in desiring that things and people be as I consider they ought be, continue to wrestle with it.
I thank you for your kind words regarding my new beginning and my recent ending and the people to come and those still in Laurens. As I ponder it, as I continue to age, endings and beginnings are not easier, but rather harder. For, as I live more fully and love more deeply, endings are painful and beginnings both elating and terrifying. May I surrender unto the Lord all of it.
Love you
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