Lent: The Serenity Prayer: A Simple Prayer to Enrich Your Life

I challenged you in my blog (Lent) to think “How can you draw closer?”

I am reading a book by Trevor Hudson this season. It has 12 chapters, and it is called “The Serenity Prayer: A Simple Prayer to Enrich Your Life” (published by The Upper Room, copyright 2012).

As I start today, I realize I said there are 12 chapters to this book, but after starting to read the book I realized there are two bonus sections at the beginning.  Today I want to challenge you to read this book, because while I am just getting started, I am finding it a wonderful read that I can do in short spurts of time that I give myself to be with God and challenge myself to draw close to God.

Today I want to reflect and challenge you about things I’ve learned from the bonus sections and the first chapter. The chapters represent sections of the prayer broken down and expanded upon.

I love Trevor Hudson’s writing, and as you get to know me you will find I gravitate towards his work even when I don’t realize it, and that is what happened with this book.  I wanted to see if there was a book on the serenity prayer and I found this book. Then I saw it was written by him.

So far, he has not disappointed.  The bonus section is entitled “An Invitation to Find Deeper Peace.” First, who doesn’t want peace? Especially right now with so much hate, tragedy, and pain going on in the world. That is why I was looking forward to Lent and taking time to intentionally draw closer to God.

It was like he just knew while I was needing to be reassured I was not alone in my feelings, he moves immediately in Chapter 1 to explain the definition for peace. This came after he explained who wrote the prayer (read the book for that info).

We all tend to feel like we are alone in feeling like God has left us when we are in the midst of too much happening in our lives (health crises, kids running us ragged, death of loved ones, loss after loss, and so many other life events)  God never leaves us, but sometimes it is hard for us to feel the presence of God because of all the noise around us.  This kind of prayer and the understanding that Trever Hudson brings us is particularly helpful.

Hudson reminded me that “Serenity is a special word, a rich word that means far more than being happy or having peace of mind or knowing inner contentment or not experiencing conflict.” (25)  That was big, because I think we see peace and serenity as interchangeable, and I mean that by the peace we think about is that we won’t fight or the chaos won’t be around. But let’s be honest for a minute; we are human, sinful, flaw-ridden people and there is always going to be chaos and conflict, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have serenity (peace) when we look at it the right way.

I love this statement: “we all, whether religious or not, have an in born desire for God.” (24) Is that not deep and beautiful, but it is so true because we are all loved creations of God.  But because of this we all are longing for a relationship with God, and until we each have a personal relationship with our creator, God, we will search and not have true serenity (peace).

Key points:

1.    “Serenity…comes as a gift from God.” (26)

2.   Did you notice I said a relationship?  What does a relationship take? TIME.

What does that mean?  It will grow over time.  It’s not like it will hit us over the head like a big truck.  Oh, I prayed for it and here it is, yeah!  It is something we pray for and receive over time, in God’s time (which is definitely not ours).

We have to be willing to trust in our relationship with the Holy, our Creator. We need to actually practice what the prayer says.