Prayer for friends
For Gary, and for Lois, and other friends who are looking straight into the face of their fears right now ... because courage doesn't mean that it isn't OK to be afraid, and because it's past one o'clock in the morning and I'm still feeling that weight on me right now (and no, it's not a sleeping cat lying on my chest), and I know that it will be hard to breathe and impossible to sleep until I have prayed through this.
In the words of Madeleine L'Engle's paraphrase of St. Patrick's Breastplate, to which I always revert when I need prayer and when my own words simply refuse to flow:
With you in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power,
and the sun with its brightness,
and the snow with its whiteness,
and the fire with all the power it hath,
and the lightning with its rapid wrath,
and the winds with their swiftness along their path,
and the sea with its deepness
and the rocks with their steepness
and the earth with its starkness,
All these I place,
By God's Almighty help and grace,
Between you and the power of darkness.
In the words of Madeleine L'Engle's paraphrase of St. Patrick's Breastplate, to which I always revert when I need prayer and when my own words simply refuse to flow:
With you in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power,
and the sun with its brightness,
and the snow with its whiteness,
and the fire with all the power it hath,
and the lightning with its rapid wrath,
and the winds with their swiftness along their path,
and the sea with its deepness
and the rocks with their steepness
and the earth with its starkness,
All these I place,
By God's Almighty help and grace,
Between you and the power of darkness.