Sweet Meditation Through Change and Grief

ALMIGHTY GOD! Who knowest the hearts of all men, search and try whether or no the meditation of our hearts touching Thee shall be sweet; whether we can bear to meditate upon Thy pureness, upon Thy justice; whether our past lives, our present faults, our future intentions, can, before Thee, give us meditation which shall be sweet. And if, O Lord God! our meditation touching ourselves be bitter, into that bitter fountain press the healing branch of Thy forgiveness, that even when face to face with our shortcomings and sins, our meditation may be sweet.

Teach us of Thy mercy and long-suffering, Thy patience and forgiveness, that, though weeping and penitent, yet quietly rejoicing, we may abide in Thy large love. Let our meditation of Thee be sweet, though the barrenness of chance and change come into our paths. When we look back upon the things that are not what they were, upon old times that are past, upon old familiar faces that are gone, and we long for the “touch of a vanished hand,” and sigh for a strength now departed for ever; when old things seem sweet things, and things near seem bitter; then on Thy changelessness may we meditate, and may our meditation of Thee be sweet.

When we think of those now gone to rest, those that have loved us and that we have loved; when we think of the friends and lovers who have passed away, and we cry—“They have all gone into a world of light, and I alone sit lingering here;” then may we remember

“God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

And believing that they all live in Thee, may our meditation of Thee be sweet.

And when we look forward to the times to come, and fear the heat and the toil, the weary way and the narrow path, the hill to be climbed, death to be faced, the judgment to be borne, then, remembering that Thou art to morrow as to-day, and to-day as yesterday, and the same for ever, may our meditation of Thee be sweet. And when we think of the life to come, and we scarce dare hope; and scarce can trust, and but half believe, may we remember that what Thou givest Thou givest for ever, and Thy Spirit won on earth is Thy Life given in heaven; then may our meditation of Thee be sweet.

Forgive us when these meditations are not sweet, forgive us, for we are of the earth, earthy. We have drunk of the bitter waters thereof, and at times we have been bitter too; but grant us the water of life, and the bread of life, and the strength of life, that until our dying day and in that last hour, our meditations of Thee may be sweet.

Forgive us all our failings; forgive us all our sins; heal us of all our sickness, and bring us all at last, of Thy mercy and not of our merit, safe into the eternal peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord.—AMEN.