Confessing Weakness

This morning, as I try to do on a Wednesday morning, I attended the service of Holy Communion at my local Anglican Church and I prayed the familar words of the prayer of confession from Common Worship:

Father eternal, giver of light and grace,
we have sinned against you and against our neighbour,
in what we have thought,
in what we have said and done,
through ignorance, through weakness,
through our own deliberate fault.

It was the phrase "through weakness" that hit me this morning.

I've always thought that confessing having sinned through weakness was saying that one had done something like broken one of the Seven Deadly Sins. For example a prayer on the order of, "Dear Lord, forgive me for having got angry at my Christian sister".

But this week, there have been times when I felt that I'd tried to do the right thing, that I honestly didn't know what to do for the best, and that I'd "missed the mark". It occured to me this morning, that I was forgiven for these sins of weakness too.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. (Psalm 103:8)