Prayers

Prayers


My Lord
Lord, I want to love you, yet I'm not sure. I want to trust you, but I'm afraid of being taken in. I know I need you, yet I'm ashamed of the need. I want to pray, yet I'm afraid of being a hypocrit. I need my independence, yet I fear to be alone. I want to belong, yet I must be myself. Take me, Lord, yet leave me alone. Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief. O Lord, if you are there, you do understand, don't you? Give me what I need but leave me free to choose. Help me to work it out my own way, but don't let me go. Let me understand myself, but don't let me despair. Come to me,O Lord - I want you. Lighten my darkness - but don't dazzle me. Help me to see what I need to do and give me the grace to do it. O Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.



Late have I loved You, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved You. For behold, You were within me and I was outside; and I sought You outside and in my unloveliness fell upon all those lovely things that You have made. You were with me, but I was not with You. I was kept from You by those things, yet had they not been in You, they would not have been at all. You called and cried to me to break open my deafness: You sent out Your beams and shone upon me and chased away my blindness: You breathed fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and now I pant for You: I tasted You, and now I hunger and thirst for You: You have touched me, and now I burn for Your peace.


O my God, how does it happen in this poor old world that you are so great and yet nobody finds you, that you call so loudly and yet nobody hears you, that you are so near and yet nobody feels you, that you give yourself to everybody and yet nobody knows your name? We flee from you and say we cannot find you; we turn our backs and say we cannot see you; we stop our ears and say we cannot hear you.


God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.