A Cold Winter Day

Monday MIssive #77

A Poem: Cold Winter Day

This new day,
Dances into existence,
Leaving frost formations
On brown and barren lawn;
Winter steals my sweet slumber.
I didn’t ask for it!
I didn’t request it!
 I don’t want it!
Covers pulled over my head,
In warmth of bed,
Pretending I’m dead.
Didn’t work with Mom either.

A decision needs to be made!
Do I get out of bed grumpy?
Or do I embrace this cold grey day
As a gift from the Creator?

I did not create this day of
Grey upon grey.
With more undertones of grey.
I would have made it
Sunshine and billowed clouds.
Brightness and warmth.

The Creator saw differently,
He created it just as it is,
A cold, granular grey;
As a grace gift.
A new day…
“To live,
To move, 
And to exist in him.”*
How I enter and live in it
Is up to me.

A Prayer: The Serenity Prayer (by Reinhold Niebuhr)

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. 
Living one day at a time; 
Enjoying one moment at a time; 
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; 
Taking, as He did, this sinful world 
As it is, not as I would have it; 
Trusting that He will make all things right
If I surrender to His will; 
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life 
And supremely happy with Him 
Forever and ever in the next. 
Amen.

A Passage: For Reflection

* For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’ Since, then, we are God’s offspring, we shouldn’t think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image fashioned by human art and imagination. “Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God now commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has set a day when he is going to judge the world in righteousness by the man he has appointed. He has provided proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
-- Acts 17:28-31