Scripture and Prayer on Thursday, February 11, 2021

Pastor David reads 2 Timothy 3 and offers a prayer from Howard Thurman:

We find it very difficult, our Father, to bring to a point of focus all of the fragmentation and divisiveness of our lives. We ask Thee to draw upon Thy long experience with Thy children, and out of this special wisdom and understanding, to interpret the words which we say to Thee in our prayer. We are overwhelmed by our great inability somehow to manage the imperfections of life, the imperfections of our own private lives, the clear insight which suddenly becomes dim and often disappears at the moment when we are sure that we could act upon it; the good deed which we express and which, as it leaves us, wings on it way to fulfill itself in another’s life, in another’s need; and as we watch, we are horrified at the way in which something goes wrong and the good deed is not a good deed in the way in which it works, and we are thrown back upon ourselves. We don’t know how to manage the imperfections fo our lives, the imperfections of so many expressions of our lives.

We have brooded over nature. We have understood here and there some of its inner mandates, and we have been able to translate those these mandates into expressions of machinery and objects, and we have learned how to operate these machines and to make these objects, created out of our insights, expressions of our intent. We have made these things into servants to obey our minds and our wills and then, suddenly, we are faced with radical and quick and devastating breakdown! Something goes wrong, we do not know what, and there is mindless violence and destruction. We don’t know how to manage the imperfections of our lives.

Now we wait for the fateful moment when once again we ourselves as a nation will begin learning, with more finesse and accuracy, to kill, to destroy. And we feel, some of us, that the only way to survive is to do this, and some of us are sure that this is but to hasten the end of the age.

How to manage the imperfections of our minds and our spirits, our thoughts, even our intent? O God, we don’t know how. We don’t know how. We don’t know how. Take all the outcry of our anguish, all the sin and brokenness of our faltering selves and hold them with such sureness that we learn from Thee.

Posted by Mt. Haley Church of God on Thursday, February 11, 2021