Lord, I beg your pardon.

Lord God Almighty,
Now I bow down before you
From deep within my heart,
Begging for your kindness.
I have sinned, Lord, I have sinned,
And I know the laws I’ve broken.
I am praying, begging you,
Forgive me, Lord, forgive me.

Don’t destroy me along with my sins.
Don’t keep my bad deeds in memory forever.
Don’t sentence me to the earth’s depths,
For you, Lord, are the God of those
Who turn from their sins.
In me you’ll show how kind you are.
Although I’m not worthy, you will
save me according to your great mercy.

I will praise you continuously
All the days of my life,
Because all of heaven’s forces praise you,
and the glory is yours forever and always.
Amen.

(From "The Prayer of Manasseh")

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Let Worries Cease

So you run and you run to
Catch up to the sun, but it 
Races around to come up behind you.
The sun is the same in a relative way
But you are older, and weaker still
And closer to death by one more day.
The wind does the same as the sun.
It blows around from North to South
And West to East where it had begun.
The rivers all flow down to the sea,
Go up in clouds and down again, as rain.
For all the circles and cycles of the sun,
And the winds, the rivers, and the rain,
There is no final destination.
What has already been is what will be,
What has been done will be done over.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Human nature is going nowhere fast,
Like the tread wheel in a hamster cage,
Or perhaps like a wheel of fortune,
Round and round and round she goes and
Where she stops nobody knows...for sure.
No matter what the new invention,
We struggle with the same contentions;
The same deficient morality
The same basic insecurity
And the same desires of the flesh.
The more that things seem to change,
The more they seem to stay the same.
It is a litany of human failure.
Look beyond the sun to our Heavenly Father.
We will only find solace in God Himself.
Come weary traveler, take your ease,
In God let us trust and let worries cease.

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You never know...

Give yourself to God before death arrives.
What you can do today don't defer 'til tomorrow,
For a day once passed never returns
And missed opportunities turn to sorrow.
You never know which chance is the last.
By the light of a feeble candle we look around.
Everything vanishes, and there is no applause.
The words at your funeral fall on deaf ears,
For you will already be entering Heaven...or Hell.
Our earthly home is but a wayside inn
On the road to our final destination.
At the moment of death we awaken to eternity.
Imagine how it will feel when it is too late
To call on the Lord to beg His pardon.
For by then, for you, it will be too late.

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