As I announced last Sunday, during this season of Lent we will be reading together Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, a classic book on the nature of Christian community. Bonhoeffer also penned many prayers, some of which are collected in his Letters and Papers from Prison, an anthology of writings drawn from his two-year imprisonment by the Nazis before his execution on April 9, 1945.
This prayer, entitled “I Cannot Do It Alone,” is an especially apt one for Lent:
God, I call to you early in the morning,
help me pray and collect my thoughts,
I cannot do so alone.
In me it is dark, but with you there is light.
I am lonely, but you do not abandon me.
I am faint-hearted, but from you comes my help.
I am restless, but with you is peace.
In me is bitterness, but with you is patience.
I do not understand your ways, but you know the right way for me.
May Bonhoeffer’s prayer be ours also.