Dear God, let me not stop with simple kindness, nor graciousness. Let me go beyond these lazy minimums of polite interaction. I congratulate myself on being pleasant, as if this were a great task.

Lord, this grace that you have rained down upon me, in truth, overflows. My reservoirs are swollen and yet I guard this resource as if it were treasure. I encounter others, and am polite, yet I send them on their way still thirsty. They were parched, yet too fearful to ask for a cup. Some did not even know of their own need. Some had perhaps never tasted sweet, clear water.

And yet here I stand, a fortress of civility, aloof and smiling as if this countenance were a gift.

Lord, let me throw open my gates. Let me walk out to meet strangers, draw them in, sustain them, build them up, until I fear even my stores are exhausted. Only when my barrels are empty can they be filled. Will you send me more grace when it will only spill on the ground around me?

Let me pour out cup after cup as they come, these visitors.

(Letter #1141)

Dear God, let me spread hope. I daily encounter others who seem to see themselves in a joyless world, a mechanical world of iron bars, clanking wheels, hard rain. Concrete. You, Lord, have changed my sight so this is not what I see, even as I walk the same ground.

I see a bud pushing through a crack in a cement pathway. I see new growth on charred trunks after a wildfire. I see a family of foxes taking shelter under an abandoned vehicle.

I see my fellows crying to one another, sharing warmth.

Lord, let what I see be seen by all. Grant me the words and deeds to convey the life springing up everywhere.

O the power, the slow power of your love that courses through the abundant life. The life is abundantly around me, and within me too, each of us, our days are abundant. Moment upon moment cascades upon me and each one is a universe of new opportunity. You shower me.

Lord. Let me call others to this vision you have laid upon me.

(Letter #1140)

Dear God, I congratulate myself on how faithful in you I am, how dependent upon you I feel. In this way I twist what is good into a misshapen tangle, cloaking it in my defects. O Lord, I torment myself as I recognize how far I fall short. I imagine faith in you to be some virtue, and it is exactly at this point that it boomerangs and becomes a shortcoming. These defects, always the same, my constant bedevilments, persistent yet manifested in ever-new ways.

Let my dependence on you be pure: the desperation of the weak. Let me be weak, that I may lurch for your hand in gratitude, and not puff myself up with displays of piety.

God, set my hands to work. Grant me duty. Let effort drive out my pride and self-regard.

(Letter #1139)

Dear God, you are sun shining down on me; you are armies arrayed behind me; you are a locomotive powering me forward. You are the force that inexorably causes the roots and branches of these trees to grow, to crush the sidewalk into rubble. You are power, my Lord, sitting here quietly with me in silence.

What shame and tragedy that I so often forget or deny this majestic force. I plan my actions as if you were absent.

Lord, let me align myself with your vast forces. Only I can get in the way of your aid to me, through denial, obstinateness, or distraction. Let me not distract myself with worry. Let me unleash you.

(Letter #1138)