God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
- The Serenity Prayer
Many are familiar with the Serenity prayer and find it helpful, even those who are not in recovery. The full prayer is worth reading and knowing, so I will go ahead and share it.
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardships 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.
- Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)
This is an awesome prayer, because if we can remember that really the only thing we can change is our response to Daddy and that we need His help with the rest we can end a lot of our fruitless fighting. Some things we need to change, some things we need changed by His power, and some things we need to accept and depend upon His grace to carry us through. That in itself can be hard to accept. We like control. We want to control what others think and feel about us, how they treat us, what happens in our life and what will happen next. We want that because we want what we want, often even at the expense of others, and we want to be comfortable, happy and feel safe. The illusion of control gives us an illusion of security.
But there is a lot of life that is not in our control, like it or not. Sometimes life can be overwhelming. There is too much going on, too much to do, too many obstacles and too many people making it more difficult instead of easier. It's in these times of being overwhelmed that I find the serenity prayer particularly useful, not necessarily as a prayer as much as a guidepost.
What in the situation or situations that I find so overwhelming are in my control? The first thing is to find the things that I can not change, can not do anything about and can not control. These need to be released. Just let them go. Pray for the grace to trust God to care for me stop fighting to fix something I have no control over. Then, what is left can be faced, one thing at a time. Do the next right thing that is in front of you, and then go on to the next. Remember always that His grace is sufficient in all those things that we need to go through, change or handle but do not have the strength and power to do so on our own.
Approaching things this way will lighten the burden and help us when we are overwhelmed. The world is fallen, and it's not going to get better until Jesus returns. So, much of life is not going to be as we want or even close to ideal. There will be struggles and times of being overwhelmed. But if we lean on His grace, let go of the things that our really out of our hands instead of trying to fight or manipulate to force our will and surrender to His will, we will find serenity during the storms, the load will lighten and we will have a life worth living, even amidst the curse and chaos.
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