Prayer for Getting My Ducks in a Row

           Dear Leader of the Flock - I spoke to You yesterday, it just wasn't in this particular space. Some of those conversations will show up in the next day or two here and in a couple of other places. The day before yesterday, though, I was here marveling at one of your amazing creations, geese.  Now today, I seem still to be in a fowl sort of mood and so I turn to You.

                Life is short, and time is of the essence always. It is important to me to slow down and pay attention to how my words and actions connect. These times are troubling - our tongues wag ahead of our thoughts; our fingers hit the keyboards so fast with reactionary comments we cannot take back once they hit the ether. Suddenly the "Us" vs "Them" camps are dividing friends and families.   Help me, please, before I speak, before I write a post for Facebook or Twitter, even before I think a thought impulsively, to remember and live into the prescient and life-giving words of Your servant Paul:

1 Corinthians 13:1-13 

13 If I speak in the tongues^[a] of people or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ² If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³ If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,^[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
⁸ Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. ¹¹ When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put the ways of childhood behind me. ¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.      AMEN!