Serenity Prayer

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

These words are the often-quoted Serenity Prayer. Most of us have heard this, prayed this, or at least read them somewhere. This past week I wanted to use them in a lesson plan for the junior high class I teach at church, so I decided to do a little research on the prayer. The back-story to this little prayer was enlightening.

First, let me say I was surprised to learn the most common version of the Serenity Prayer was just a piece of it. The above simple four-line prayer we know is but an opening to the original words written as part of a sermon by Reinhold Niebuhr, an American of German decent in wartime 1943. An American pastor that found himself at odds with Protestant and Catholic Church leaders because he felt they failed to lead their people in the crisis of war, he was a deeply devout man that wrestled daily with the problem of how to relate his innermost religious commitments to the public life of the community. The complete original prayer written in a time when the world was facing the evil of Hitler is as follows:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.

From the beginning of the prayer, the need for serene acceptance is evident. In a war-torn world of the day, it might seem impossible to feel serene yet the need for acceptance of the current situations came with a serenity only found when one seeks it in God. The petition asks for courage to step up for changes necessary in the hostile environment of that day translates to a timeless plea that transcends any place in history. Though not mentioned, the times required discernment combined with wisdom to determine the things one could change from those things that we must accepted.

Still, in that time of war and evil threats to society as he knew it, this Pastor prayed for these things in order to live in appreciation of each day, accepting, as Christ did, the hardships as stepping-stones to living in peace by trusting and surrendering completely to God. He accepted this surrender would bring him reasonable happiness in this life and assured the supreme happiness in eternity with God.

The remarkable outcome of this humble prayer was that today, sixty-seven years after first penned, this prayer is one of the most recognizable and often quoted prayers of our day. It asks from God the power and skills to live, as He would have us live; recognizing complete surrender to God as the only path. That, my Friends, is a timeless message for us all in any generation.