The Fog and the Light: (A Reflection on the Collect of the Day)

I’m working on a book of devotionals on the Collects from the Book of Common Prayer.
Below is a reflection on this Sunday’s Collect of the Day.
I’ll send my usual devotional on the Sunday Gospel tomorrow.
Hope you enjoy. I’d love your feedback.

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O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The Collect of the Day for Proper 10 (1979 BCP)

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We don’t always want to know what’s right.

Because knowing might undo us.
We might have to speak up. Forgive. Let go. Change.
So we nurse our uncertainty, calling it complexity or nuance. We wait for one more sign—one more opinion—one more way out.

We say we’re searching for wisdom—but often, we’re seeking escape.
Not because we don’t know, but because knowing costs.
It asks us to forgive, to sacrifice, to trust, to act. And so we hesitate.

This kind of protective ambiguity isn’t abstract—it’s painfully familiar. In The West Wing, President Bartlet faces a gut-wrenching choice: to intervene and stop the execution of a man on death row. He doesn’t truly believe in capital punishment. But acting would cost him—politically and personally. So he waits, prays, consults, and then does nothing. The man dies.

Later, Bartlet confesses to his priest, “I don’t know how to do this.” The truth is—he did. He just couldn’t bear the price.

Sometimes, ambiguity isn’t confusion. It’s self-protection. We stay in the fog because we fear the light’s demands.

This Collect doesn’t let us hide. It speaks to our deepest need—not just to know what is right, but to love it. To walk in it.

It begins with humility: we ask God to receive us mercifully, even as we are—uncertain, unfinished, inconsistent. Then we pray for wisdom—real wisdom for the murky moments when Scripture offers no script, when faithfulness feels like a crossroads with many possible paths.

And then, most honestly, we ask for the grace and power to do what we’ve come to see. Because knowing the good isn’t enough. We grow tired. Afraid. We stall. Drift.

So we ask not only for clarity, but courage. Not just insight, but strength. We ask that God’s grace move in us what we cannot move ourselves.

Like the father who’s never been able to say he’s sorry—who dials the number, heart pounding, knowing what he needs to say. The son finally answers. And somehow, grace gives him the strength to speak the words he never could.

And here is the miracle: God does that very thing for us.

God does not simply call us to the path. He walks within us, beside us, ahead of us. He gives what he commands. He supplies what he asks.

Grace is not only pardon—it is power.
Not just mercy that forgives, but presence that transforms.

We don’t always know what to do.
And even when we do, we don’t always have the will.

But the One who calls us is also the One who equips us.
The God who asks us to trust is the very one who gives us faith.

“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,” Caspar David Friedrich, 1817.