Surely knot I, Lord

In the midst of preparing for our Monastic Experience here at Clyde, MO this week, I ran across the following 'Knot prayer' which I think can be helpful when discerning:

Dear God:

Please untie the knots

that are in my mind,

my heart and my life.

Remove the have nots,

the can nots and the do nots

that I have in my mind.

Erase the will nots,

may nots, might nots that may find

a home in my heart.

Release me from the could nots,

would nots and 

should nots that obstruct my life.

And most of all,

Dear God,

I ask that you remove from my mind,

my heart and my life 

all of the ‘am nots’

that I have allowed to hold me back,

especially the thought

that I am not good enough.

Amen

Author known to God

This got me to thinking about how knotted up our lives can be and how many 'nots' we may let rule us.  We quite easily tie our knots by the choices we make.   Sometimes women feeling the call to religious life think they are not worthy or good enough because of past choices.  I tell them, "My dear,  EVERYBODY has a skeleton in their closet."

For some reason we forget that Jesus came to call sinners, not the righteous!

The biggest enemy to our spiritual life is the 'knots' and 'nots' in our minds and hearts as suggested in the prayer above.  Every "I am not or I can not...etc,"  ties a little knot in our mind re-inforcing the 'not'.   


I told God straight up when I first felt a call, "I canNOT do that."  


The father of one of our Sisters used to tell his daughters when they were young how nice it would be if one of them became a nun.  This Sister used to say, "Well it's NOT going to be me.  


I'm not quite sure how, but God did manage to untie that little 'not' in both of us to get us on the right path.   I suppose we had to let God grab both ends of the rope and untie.


So, God wants to know, are you going to let knots and nots rule your life??