Pray To Be Made What We Should Be

We often pray to be delivered from calamities; we even trust that we shall be; but we do not pray to be made what we should be, in the very presence of the calamities; to live amid them, as long as they last, in the consciousness that we are, held and sheltered by the Lord, and can therefore remain in the midst of them, so long as they continue, without any hurt.

For forty days and nights, the Saviour was kept in the presence of Satan in the wilderness, and that, under circumstances of special trial, His human nature being weakened by want of food and rest. The furnace was heated seven times more than it was wont to be heated, but the three Hebrew children were kept a season amid its flames as calm and composed in the presence of the tyrant's last appliances of torture, as they were in the presence of himself before their time of deliverance came. And the livelong night did Daniel sit among the lions, and when he was taken up out of the den, "no manner of hurt was found upon him, because he believed in his God." They dwelt in the presence of the enemy, because they dwelt in the presence of God.
--Excerpt: Streams in the Desert

A Morning Prayer

I owe the Lord a morning song
Of gratitude and praise,
For the kind mercy He has shown
In length'ning out my days.

Keep me from danger and from sin;
Help me Thy will to do,
So that my heart be pure within;
And I Thy goodness know.
--Hymns of Zion #203 vs. 1 & 3

Above Tis Calm and Brighter

Draw, O Lord, us near to Thee;
Draw to Thee each valiant fighter.
Storm and night surround us here,
But above 'tis calm and brighter.
There, beyond death and the tomb,
Radiant morn dispels the gloom.
--Zion's Harp #99 vs. 3