Maybe it’s because of my age. Maybe it’s because of the complexity of my life. Maybe it’s because I’m more focused on God than I was forty or fifty years ago. Maybe it’s because I value the simplicity of old age. But a childhood prayer has been echoing in my mind these past few days, not supplanting the prayers I usually say, but reminding me of the ones he said every night as a child:
Now I go to sleep.
I pray to God to keep my soul.
And if I die before I wake up,
I pray to God that my soul takes.
Maybe it’s just a matter of distilling my complex life down to its simplest form and getting rid of all the unimportant stuff that normally occupies one’s life. Maybe it’s just a matter of looking at where we’ve come from and where we’re going, and measuring our lives in teaspoons instead of endless gallons, and maybe it’s just a matter of focusing on the importance of fulfilling one’s destiny and making a difference in this world. , leaving it better than we found it, but I find my childhood prayer very comforting.
It’s comforting in a way that it wasn’t comforting when I was a kid. In those years, I prayed the memory prayer and ended this prayer by blessing all the members of my family, also from memory.
Over the years, as I grew closer to my family and realized how lucky I was to have been born into this family and appreciated the close ties we shared, I prayed differently. My words came from my heart, not my head, and every night and several times during most days, I continually thanked God for all these blessings that I was lucky enough to receive.
Every time I hear of other people’s trials and tribulations, it saddens me and reinforces my gratitude for all that they have given me. I hold it close to my heart, like the most precious secret and I hold on to it like the gift that it is.
I know that I can’t cure all the problems in the world or fix all the problems of the people I know, but I try to share the part of me that is accessible to those who need love and support.
I am in the process of learning to distinguish between those who really need it and those who just want to take what they can without lifting a finger to help themselves. It’s been a hard lesson to learn, this separation from drinkers who continue to drink without caring about how much they’ve taken, and with people who take only what they need and work hard to use the life lessons they’ve learned. However, I am slowly learning this lesson well enough that I don’t have to keep repeating it over and over again, and I am slowly learning to get rid of people in my life who don’t have my best interests at heart, but they want everything they can get without thinking about how they get it.
It is a lesson worth learning. Everyone needs to listen to their intuition and recognize the red flags they see and pay attention to their messages.