thank you, O God...

Robert Louis Stevenson cottage
Saranac Lake, NY

(he lived here the winter of 1888)

"Help me, O God,
to look back on the long way
you have brought me,
on the long days in which I have been served,
not according to my deserts,
but my desires;
on the pit and the miry clay,
the blackness of despair,
the horror of misconduct,
from which my feet have been plucked out.
For my sins forgiven or prevented,
for my shame unpublished,
I bless and thank you, O God."

- Robert Louis Stevenson