Good Friday morning, my friends.
Happy Robbie Burns Day! Well, technically it is tomorrow. But I am wearing my kilt today in his honour (tis true).
Now Robbie Burns is not known a great theologian, or as a bastion of virtue for that matter, but he experienced what many of us go through in life - the hand of God guiding us, blessing us, and sometimes correcting us. This prayer was written during a time in Burns' life where it appears God was trying to get his attention. This is what Burns himself said about writing it:
There was a certain period of my life that my spirit was broke by repeated losses and disasters, which threatened and indeed effected the ruin of my fortune. My body, too, was attacked by the most dreadful distemper, a hypochondria or confirmed melancholy. In this wretched state, the recollection of which makes me yet shudder, I hung my harp on the willow-trees, except in some lucid intervals, in one of which I composed the following (see prayer below).
Burns recognized and acknowledged that God was behind all that was happening to him. Oh to have had that clarity.
Amazing Grace and Eternal Peace be yours,
Bruce
O Thou Great Being! what Thou art
Surpasses me to know;
Yet sure I am, that known to Thee
Are all Thy works below.
Thy creature here before Thee stands,
All wretched and distrest;
Yet sure those ills that wring my soul
Obey Thy high behest.
Sure Thou, Almighty, canst not act
From cruelty or wrath!
O, free my weary eyes from tears,
Or close them fast in death!
But if I must afflicted be,
To suit some wise design;
Then, man my soul with firm resolves
To bear and not repine!
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