“Everything starts with prayer.”  ~ Mother Teresa

Last week was another crazy week in my life, and as I sat on my patio one evening fretting about what I should do about this week’s post, I remembered a prayer that my husband found, years ago, taped to the bottom of his desk drawer at work. Its words have helped to calm me down many times since then, reminding me that there is way more to life than whatever it is I am worrying about.

So, in honor of this week’s topic, here are the words that help me to ‘connect through prayer’.

“Slow me down, Lord! Ease the pounding of my heart by the quieting of my mind.

Steady my hurried pace with a vision of the eternal reach of time.

Give me, amidst the confusion of my day, the calmness of the everlasting hills.

Break the tensions of my nerves and muscles with the soothing music of the singing streams that live in my memory.

Help me to know the magic restoring power of sleep.

Teach me the art of taking minute vacations…of slowing down to look at a flower, to chat with a friend, to pat a dog, to read a few lines from a good book.

Remind me each day of the fable of the hare and the tortoise that I may know that the race is not always to the swift; that there is more to life than increasing its speed.

Let me look upward into the branches of the towering oak and know that it grew great and strong because it grew slowly and well.

Slow me down, Lord, and inspire me to send my roots deep into the soil of life’s enduring values, that I may grow toward the stars of my greater destiny.” 

~ Wilfred A. Peterson

I guess that, for me, prayer is simply a way to connect to something larger than myself. And whether that something is called God, or the Universe, or Allah, doesn’t matter at all, at least to me. What I think is important is that, through our prayers, we are all acknowledging that we actually agree that there is something bigger.

If only we could choose to see that the thing we’ve allowed to divide us the most could be the one thing that might bring us all together.

We just have to let it.