What Should be My Priority?

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 “Throughout that nine-year period, from my nineteenth year to my twenty-eighth, I was astray myself and led others astray, was deceived and deceived others in various forms of self-assertion, publicly by the teaching of what are called the liberal arts, privately under the false name of religion; in the one proud, in the other superstitious, in both vain. On the one side of my life I pursued the emptiness of popular glory and the applause of spectators, with competition for prize poems and strife for garlands of straw and the vanity of stage shows and untempered lusts; on the other side I was striving to be made clean of all this same filth, by bearing food to those who were called elect and holy, that in the factory of their own stomachs they should turn it into angels and deities by whom I was to be set free. And I followed out this line of conduct; and so did my friends who were deceived by me and with me. Let the proud of heart deride me now and all who have never been brought low and broken by Thee unto salvation, O my God; it is only for Thy glory that I confess to Thee all my ingloriousness. Grant me, I beseech Thee, to retraverse now in memory the past ways of my error and to offer Thee a sacrifice of rejoicing. For without Thee, what am I but a guide to my own destruction? Or at my best what am I but an infant suckled on Thy milk and feeding upon Thee, O Food incorruptible? What indeed is any man, seeing that he is but a man? Let the strong in their own power mock on, I in my weakness and neediness will confess unto Thee.”

- Saint Augustine

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