...willingly serve This continues the thought from the previous page regarding the soul's conversion and its duty to serve others.. Let me be a blessed instrument, through whose assistance the wretched may eat and be satisfied both spiritually and physically, so that those who seek after You may praise You, and their heart may live forever. Amen!

A small decorative woodcut ornament featuring a stylized crown or floral motif.

The Third Hour of Rest in GOD,

Set your house in order, for you shall die and not remain alive.

My GOD, the dark night breaks in once again, and I do not know whether the long night of death might cover me even today. O most gracious GOD, when I must one day step to these gates of death and look into the great, wide eternity, what a fearful terror might then seize me. For my future well-being or woe will then depend original: "dependiren" — a Latinate loanword common in 18th-century German scholarly and devotional writing. on my life lived well or poorly until now, or rather, on my dying well or poorly. Ah! What in the world is more terrifying to a wrongdoer than the announcement of death? But should death not be many thousands of times more terrifying to me if I had to die in the uncertainty of that state which is to follow death? When I view death as a necessary consequence of our sins, it is already terrifying enough. Were You not Yourself anxious, my Savior, until the baptism of death This refers to the "baptism" of suffering mentioned by Jesus in Luke 12:50, often associated with his agony in Gethsemane. was completed in You? Ah! whoever could have looked into Your heart back then, in this Your anxiety, he would—