May I share an excerpt from “A Prayer Journal” by Flannery O’Connor.  I got caught in an airport this last weekend, and thank God I found this book.  In the middle of DFW, all around me people praying.  Snow storm.  Broken planes.  Delayed and canceled flights.  The tiniest airport chapel was crowded.  Prayer in this way isn’t a private exercise but a family conversation.  So I share from the author’s journal now with you.

“Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside. “

This is from a lost journal found and published many years after her death 2013.  I refer you to it.  It’s lovely and inspiring and deadly in self-knowledge.  Lubbock is coming back from ten inches of snow, and there’s a crescent moon that draws my attention this week, coincidentally not, in prayer and in conversation with you.   Scott