Prayer

I read this prayer today. Convicting and true.

"O Father in Heaven, who fashioned my limbs to serve You and my soul to follow hard after You, with sorrow and contrition of heart I acknowledge before You the faults and failures of the day.

Too long, O Father, have I tried Your patience; too often have I betrayed the sacred trust You have given me to keep; yet You are still willing that I should come to You in lowliness of heart, as now I do, beseeching You to drown my transgressions in the sea of Your infinite love.

My failure to be true even to my own accepted standards; my self-deception in face of temptation, my choosing of the worse when I know the better...

O Lord forgive.

My failure to apply to myself the standards of conduct I demand of others, my blindness to the suffering of others and my slowness to be taught by my own, my complacence toward wrongs that do not touch my own case and my over-sensitiveness to those that do, my slowness to see the good in my fellows and to see the evil in myself, my hardness of heart toward my neighbor's faults and my readiness to make allowance for my own, my unwillingness to believe that You called me to a small work and my brother to a great one...

O Lord forgive."

-John Baillie