Prayer of Saint Frances

So I just want to share my favorite prayer with you all: the Prayer of St. Frances.

Lord, make me an instrument of you peace.  Where there is hatred let me sow love Where there is injury pardon Where there is doubt faith Where there is despair hope Where there is darkness light And where there is sadness joy Oh Divine Master, grant that I may not do much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, or be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoning, and it is in dying that we are born o eternal life. Amen

Okay. I love this prayer SO much. For me it just really sums up what we are called to do as disciples of Christ. We are called to to give pardon where there is injury, faith where there is doubt, hope where there is despair, etc.

I encourage y'all  to memorize this prayer. I memorized it when I was ten (five years ago) and I said it every night. And I really saw a difference in my life. I already knew that I was supposed to do those things but just having everything summed up like that and saying the prayer every night not only reminded me of what I was called to do, but it gave me a much stronger desire to go act on it. The more I said it the more I really felt called to live out everything in that prayer. And the good thing about this prayer is the way it's written. So you can focus on living it out one line at a time. First work on pardoning people, then work on bringing faith to those who doubt things, then try to give hope for those who despair, and so on. And when you look at it like that it seems a lot less hard than trying to do it all at once.

Think about your faith being the language of God. If you try to learn everything about a language at once, it's going to take you so much longer to figure it out than taking it one step at at time. Same with your faith life. If you try to perfect everything about you at once it's going to take a long time to get anywhere. But if you perfect one or two things at a time you will get much farther much faster!

-Kateri