Oh God I Need Thee

by Howard Thurman

“O God, I Need Thee. I need thy sense of time.

Always I have an underlying anxiety about things. Sometimes I am in a hurry to achieve my ends, and am completely without patience. It is hard for me to realize that some growth is slow, that all processes are not swift. I cannot always discriminate between what takes time to develop and what can be rushed, because my sense of time is dulled. I measure things in terms of happenings.

O to understand the meaning of perspective, that I may do all things with a profound sense of leisure, I need a sense of time. I need a sense of order. The confusion of the details of living is sometimes overwhelming. The little things keep getting in my way providing ready-made excuses for failure to do and be what I know I ought to do and be. Much time is spent on things that are put into an insignificant place in my scheme of order. I must unscramble place in my scheme of order. I must unscramble affairs so that my life will become order.

O God, I need a sense of order. I need a sense of the future. Teach me to know that life is ever on the side of the future. Keep alive in me the forward look, the high hope, the onward surge. Let me not be frozen either by the past or the present. Grant me, O patient Father, Thy sense of the future without which all life would sicken and die. Amen.”