Undone
There's a challenging prayer of confession in the Book of Common Worship of my particular Christian tribe, the Presbyterian Church (USA). Part of the prayer goes something like this: Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. That last line has always troubled me. "...and by what we have left undone." There's a part of me that understands that troubling line as a way to acknowledge that there are good and true things we often neglect that have an adverse effect on the broken things in our world. But there's a bigger part of me that has always seen it as an indictment of my inadequacy that leads me to guilt over all the things I haven't accomplished, the tasks I've left incomplete, the causes I've never taken up... Today, I found myself thinking about something I wrote over twenty years ago--an introduction to a story or a book I...