Dear Friends,
As we build the Beloved Community, we pray for you every day that you might continue to bring it about in your little corner of the world.
Today's Meditation is a prayer by Howard Thurman, "O God I Need Thee" as we build the Beloved Community. It was send to us by Vince Maraventano.
We invite you to join us as we commit ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in the church, in healthcare, in the workplace--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.
In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that it is God's economy of abundance: when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.
We hope and pray that you find peace, healing, hope and the infusion of joy in your life!
With our love and care,
Ron and Jean
MEDITATION: Howard Thurman: "O God I Need Thee"
O God, I Need Thee
Spiritual Practice by Howard Thurman
I Need Thy Sense of Time
Always I have an underlying anxiety about things.
Sometimes I am in a hurry to achieve my ends
And am completely without patience. It is hard for me
to realize that some growth is slow,
that all processes are not swift. I cannot always discriminate
between what takes time to develop and what can be rushed,
because my sense of time is dulled.
I measure things in terms of happenings.
O to understand the meaning of perspective
that I may do all things with a profound sense of leisure – of
time.
I Need Thy Sense of Order
The confusion of the details of living
Is sometimes overwhelming. The little things
keep getting in my way providing ready-made
excuses for failure to do and be
what I know I ought to do and be.
Much time is spent on things that are not very important
while significant things are put into an insignificant place
in my scheme of order. I must unscramble my affairs
so that my life will become order. O God, I need
Thy sense of order.
I Need Thy Sense of the Future
Teach me to know that life is ever
on the side of the future.
Keep alive in me the forward look, the high hope,
the onward surge. Let me not be frozen
either by the past or the present.
Grant me, O patient Father, Thy sense of the future
without which all life would sicken and die.
— Howard Thurman in Conversations with God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans