“Mom, we don’t need to say that prayer today,” Reese, my 7 year old son, said after I asked if he was ready to say the Serenity Prayer. My heart paused – not really sure whether to rejoice or have some hesitancy. Each day, as we walk over a mile to school we say the Serenity Prayer; both walking and saying the prayer were rituals we began almost 2 years ago as we searched for ways to help Reese with his anxiety regarding school.
I’m excited at his statement because I can see how much he’s grown in the last year. It is a praise to our Heavenly Father that the same fears no longer overcome him leading into his day.
The hesitancy is because when most people become “self-sufficient” or “spiritually proud” they also have a tendency to drift from a reliance on God. For example, if the check engine light comes on in the car, who is more likely to say a prayer first – the person that has $2,000 in savings or the person that already had to make a choice between paying the electricity or phone bill this month? Yet both require God’s hand in supplying their need whether they acknowledge it or not.
The standard wedding vows in America are “for richer or poorer… for better or for worse”. A few years ago, Ron and I were standing face to face at the end of a Weekend to Remember marriage conference about to renew our vows; I could barely get the words out of my mouth because we had held the lifeless body of our son only a few months earlier. As I looked at him, this concept pierced my heart – The “richer” isn’t better, the “poorer” isn’t worse. When I looked back on our years of marriage, the times that we grew the most was in what we would define as the “worse” times, and somehow those times are redefined as the “sweetest” times.
The Apostle Paul said in Phillippians 4:12, “I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need.” I believe that “humble means” isn’t necessarily the bad and “prosperity” isn’t necessarily the good. It is all good when there is full reliance on God in the midst of both. Prosperity is miserable when it is filled with selfishness and disconnectedness. A reliance on God creates a sweetness and peace in life that otherwise does not exist.
Today, I pray for each of you the same thing I pray for my son – I give praise for growth and change, and I continue to pray for an acknowledgement of where the good gift of peace originated. Praise God that He is the giver of all good things – though at times we do not properly define “good” and “bad”.
