LINKS
NEWS & UPDATES
Officers' Meetings
LJA Officers will meet on June 15 and July 27 at 6:30 p.m. to plan for the upcoming club year.
New Member Social
The annual social will be held on Sunday, August 29 from 2-4 p.m.
MEMBERS ONLY
Les Jeunes Amies Club Collect
Keep us O Lord from pettiness, let us be large in thought, in word and deed,
Let us be done with fault finding and leave off self seeking.
May we put away all pretense and meet each other face to face, without self pity and without prejudice.
May we never be hasty in judgement and always generous.
Teach us to put into action our better impulses, straight forward and unafraid.
Let us take time for all things; make us grow calm, serene, and gentle.
Grant that we may realize that it is the little things that create differences; that in the big things of life we are one.
And may we strive to touch and know the great human heart common to us all, and O Lord God,
Let us not forget to be kind.
The story of the collect as told by the author, Mary Stewart
The Collect was written as a personal prayer for the day, and without any organization in mind. It was written at Longmont, Colorado in 1904 where, just out of college, I was entering my first job as principal of the local high school. The prayer was offered for publication under the title, "A Collect for Club Woman," because at the time I felt that women working together with wide interest for large ends was a new thing under the sun, and that perhaps they had need for special petition and mediation of their own and distributed it throughout the Empire.
The first printing of the Collect was in an obscure paragraph in the column called "Club Notes" in the Delineator, a woman's magazine no longer published, but at the time nationally popular. Later, copies were struck off by a local printer for the members of Longmont Fortnightly Club of Colorado; a federated club. About 1909, Paul Elder and Company of San Francisco printed it as a wall card. In 1924, wall cards were put out by Armstrong Stationary Company of Cincinnati. All earlier copies were signed by Mary Stuart, a spelling used until 1920 as a pen name. Since then the spelling Stewart has been used both for a pen name and signature, and the Collect has been so signed.
The first women's organization to hear or use the Collect or to print it in its yearbooks and biennial reports was the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Since then, it has been reported in many forms in many lands.