Every morning (except when I'm working from home for unspecified periods of time due to the end of the world) my alarm goes off at 5AM. Well, it's not REALLY 5AM because I have every clock in the house set ahead by anywhere from ten to twenty minutes. The one next to the bed is fifteen minutes or so. After 29 years of marriage Himself doesn't look at the clocks. He only trusts his watch. Who could blame him?
I don't fall back asleep once it goes off. I lie in bed, turn on my brain, and begin my morning prayers. You might think that I should be kneeling next to the bed, or at least sitting reverently, but the Deity knows the conditions of my knees and His/Her hearing is pretty good. S/He seems willing to indulge me.
There is a very precise order. I bless the immediate family and ask for their health and happiness and protection. This covers my husband, my kids, my father-in-law, my siblings and their kids, all mentioned by name. Then I move on to my litany of friends, first male, then female in a specific order so I don't forget anyone. Then it gets tricky. There are the prayers I promised for anyone with a problem or an illness. That takes a while. Then comes the list of relatives and friends who have passed away, and in addition to the usual crowd one would expect at my age, I have a depressingly long list of very young to youngish friends who have slipped away to the other side when I wasn't looking. And every so often someone gets moved from the living friends to the non-living friends and it takes weeks to get that memorized because it's a new order. Then there's the state of the world, the children in the cages, the poor, the immigrants. Well you can see this goes on for a while.
Without this routine in the morning, though, I feel as though I am not doing my part. That if anything horrible happens it's probably because I took a short cut. Because I really do believe in the power of prayer. In addition, it is a wonderful way to touch base with all the wonderful people I know. As their name comes up I will realize it's been a while since I've reached out, so I make a mental note to call or write. And for the ones who aren't here to write to anymore, it's a chance to spend a minute holding their face in my mind and feeling their love in my heart again. You wouldn't want to start a day without doing that.
It is not terribly fashionable to admit to an active prayer life, I suppose, but just as I don't think about re-charging my cell phone, this practice has become how I charge myself. It's a scary world these days (OK, it always has been) but there are also so many things for which I am grateful, and I take time to list those things, too. So by the time my feet hit the floor it's probably closer to 5:20 in the real world (or "Atomic Time" as Himself likes to say) but I feel a little less worried about many things. So what's an extra twenty minutes? Or thirty-five if you want to get technical about it?
I don't fall back asleep once it goes off. I lie in bed, turn on my brain, and begin my morning prayers. You might think that I should be kneeling next to the bed, or at least sitting reverently, but the Deity knows the conditions of my knees and His/Her hearing is pretty good. S/He seems willing to indulge me.
There is a very precise order. I bless the immediate family and ask for their health and happiness and protection. This covers my husband, my kids, my father-in-law, my siblings and their kids, all mentioned by name. Then I move on to my litany of friends, first male, then female in a specific order so I don't forget anyone. Then it gets tricky. There are the prayers I promised for anyone with a problem or an illness. That takes a while. Then comes the list of relatives and friends who have passed away, and in addition to the usual crowd one would expect at my age, I have a depressingly long list of very young to youngish friends who have slipped away to the other side when I wasn't looking. And every so often someone gets moved from the living friends to the non-living friends and it takes weeks to get that memorized because it's a new order. Then there's the state of the world, the children in the cages, the poor, the immigrants. Well you can see this goes on for a while.
Without this routine in the morning, though, I feel as though I am not doing my part. That if anything horrible happens it's probably because I took a short cut. Because I really do believe in the power of prayer. In addition, it is a wonderful way to touch base with all the wonderful people I know. As their name comes up I will realize it's been a while since I've reached out, so I make a mental note to call or write. And for the ones who aren't here to write to anymore, it's a chance to spend a minute holding their face in my mind and feeling their love in my heart again. You wouldn't want to start a day without doing that.
It is not terribly fashionable to admit to an active prayer life, I suppose, but just as I don't think about re-charging my cell phone, this practice has become how I charge myself. It's a scary world these days (OK, it always has been) but there are also so many things for which I am grateful, and I take time to list those things, too. So by the time my feet hit the floor it's probably closer to 5:20 in the real world (or "Atomic Time" as Himself likes to say) but I feel a little less worried about many things. So what's an extra twenty minutes? Or thirty-five if you want to get technical about it?
RSS Feed