Day 7: 40-4-4 Lenten Prayer for Social Justice

DAY 7

40-4-4 Lenten Prayer for Social Justice

(40 days at 4:00 pm for 4 minutes)

Howard Thurman

(1899–1981)

Howard Thurman was an African-American theologian, preacher, and activist and a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century, including mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and many other civil rights leaders. He was one of the principal architects of the modern, nonviolent civil rights movement and a key mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was also one of the most influential theologians of the 20th Century. Born on November 18, 1900 in Daytona Beach, Florida, Thurman was raised by his grandmother who had been a slave. Thurman became an ordained Baptist minister in 1925 and served as the minister at Mt. Zion Baptist church in Oberlin, Ohio. In 1932, he took the post of Professor and Dean at Rankin Chapel at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He wrote over 120 works, including 20 books. His most famous book, Jesus and the Disinherited, published in 1949, used New Testament gospels to describe how a non-violent civil rights movement could be successful. His book influenced Martin Luther King, Jr., whose father was Thurman’s classmate at Morehouse College. In 1953, Dr. Thurman became the first African American Professor and Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University in Massachusetts and died in San Francisco on April 10, 1981 at the age of 80.

Click to watch "Backs Against The Wall: The Howard Thurman Story" on youtube.com

PRAYER WITH HOWARD THURMAN

I NEED YOU

I need Your sense of time. Always I have an underlying anxiety about things. Sometimes I am in a hurry to achieve my ends and am completely without patience. It is hard for me to realize that some growth is slow, that not all processes are swift. I cannot discriminate between what takes time to develop and what can be rushed because my sense of time is dulled. O to understand the meaning of perspective that I may do all things with a profound sense of leisure of time.

I need Your sense of order. The confusion of the details of living is sometimes overwhelming. The little things keep getting in my way, providing ready-made excuses for failure to do and be what I know I ought to do and be. Much time is spent on things that are not very important while significant things are put in an insignificant place in my scheme of order. I must unscramble my affairs so that my life will become order. O God, I need Your sense of order.

I need Your sense of the future. Teach me to know that life is ever on the side of the future. Keep alive in me the future look, the high hope. Let me not be frozen either by the past or the present. Grant me, O Patient One, Your sense of the future without which all life would sicken and die.

OUR LITTLE LIVES

Our little lives, our big problems—these we place upon Your altar!

The quietness in Your temple of silence again and again rebuffs us:

For some there is no discipline to hold them steady in the waiting,

And the minds reject the noiseless invasion of Your spirit.

For some there is no will to offer what is central in the thoughts—

The confusion is so manifest, there is no starting place to take hold.

For some the evils of the world tear down all concentrations

And scatter the focus of the high resolves.

We do not know how to do what we know to do.

We do not know how to be what we know to be.

Our little lives, our big problems—these we place upon Your altar!

Pour out upon us whatever our spirits need of shock, of life, of release

That we may find strength for these days—

Courage and hope for tomorrow.

In confidence we rest in Your sustaining grace

Which makes possible triumph in defeat, gain in loss, and love in hate.

We rejoice this day to say:

Our little lives, our big problems—these we place upon Your altar!

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