St. Francis. Hope you have a lot of spare time.

An interesting series of events this week. Monday, I was preparing to give the thought for institute Tuesday night, when I came accross a draft in my hotmail account from my mission. I'm not sure how that email got saved as a draft way back when without me ever realizing it. It happens to be my email home at the end of one of the most important weeks of my mission. My comp. and I feeling like we needed to try and find a better area of town to tract, drove around looking for a street we felt good about. When we found it, we tracted and taught two discussions and made 7 appointments with others on that street for another time. One of those appointments was Zanele Jama, the one Baptism I saw on mission. She was baptised only about 2 months later. Later her husband and children were also baptised.

At the end of that email, I mentioned that I had read Matt. 10 that week and loved it. I decided to pull that out and see if I could get a good spiritual thought from that chapter. I decided I would share verse 8, where it says at the end: "freely you have recieved, freely give".

Later that night, I pulled out Dale Carnegie's book "how to stop worrying and start living" and was going through the places I had marked. The last page I marked was the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi that I recognized from a men's chorus song:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy 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.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying to self that we are born to Eternal Life.

I thought that went with the scripture pretty well and that I might share it for the thought in conjunction with Matt 10:8.

The next day, work was rather slow so I looked up St. Francis of Assisi on Wikipedia. Here's some interesting things about him:

"he had a mystical experience in the Church of San Damiano just outside of Assisi, in which the Icon of Christ Crucified came alive and said to him 3 times, 'Francis, Francis, go and repair My house which, as you can see, is falling into ruins.'" Very interesting....

The biggest life changing experience for him was hearing a sermon on Matt 10...hmm...Very VERY interesting ;)

Apparently, however, the prayer cannot actually be traced accurately to him. That's too bad.