By Dwight Lee Wolter.
“God, grant me the…courage
to change the things I can…”
Welcome to part two of this three-part series on the Serenity Prayer. In part one, I told you a story about a man who stood on the beach, threatening the tide if it dared to come in; and later pleading with the tide not to go out. Neither threats nor pleading worked. The man lacked the serenity to accept [the tide] he could not change.
Allow me to tell you another beach story: A woman was walking along a beach that was littered with dead and dying starfish. Periodically, she would stoop down, pick one up and toss it back into the ocean. A man was watching her and shouted, “There are thousands of starfish stranded on this beach. Your efforts won’t make a difference.” The strolling woman stooped and picked up one more starfish, tossed it back into the ocean and said, “It makes a difference to that one.” Clearly, this woman knew that she was powerless to completely reverse a dire situation; but she had decided to change the things she can, no matter what a doubting onlooker was shouting at her from the sidelines.
Many times, we feel our actions will not matter and we shrug our shoulders and say things like, “You can’t fight City Hall.” Other times, we give up on our dreams as if they were dead and dying starfish. We abandon our dreams, without first trying to place some of them back into the nourishing water.
We may even choose to do nothing about global poverty and hunger. We feel we can’t possibly make much of a difference, so we choose to make no difference whatsoever and we… walk… away… without realizing that when we offer even a simple bowl of soup to a hungry person that single bowl of soup makes a big difference to that hungry soul, that malnourished starfish.
A person saving a dying starfish on a beach, and a person serving a hungry person in a soup kitchen are changing the things they can, but what about the word “courage” in this second section of the Serenity Prayer: “courage to change the things we can”? Does it really take courage to change? Not always. You can change a person’s life forever by barging into a situation with guns (or words) blazing—shooting first and aiming later—but that is not courage. There are other words to describe such behavior.
Remember when the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz says, “What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? What makes the Hottentot so hot? What have they got that I ain’t got?” [Courage].
Many people claim that if they could eliminate fear from their lives then they would be more courageous. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Courage is not the absence of fear; but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.”
What, to you, is more important that fear? If courage is not recklessness and arrogance; then what is it? Courage, to many spiritually-inclined people, is depending on God to guide us as we do the next right thing. Courage is demonstrating not what we can do, but what God can do through us. Courage is not a way to bully our way into victory. It takes courage to realize and accept that while God may not spare us from all adversity, God will surely guide us through it. God is a source of strength and help in times of trouble. Therefore, we shall not fear… or at least we shall not allow fear to paralyze us into inaction as we ask God to grant us the courage to change the things we can.
Dwight Lee Wolter is the pastor of the Congregational Church of Patchogue on Long Island, New York. He is the author of several books and blogs at dwightleewolter.com.
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