Our Human Superpower

I gave up on Christianity when I was seven years old. Sitting in church next to my grandpa, who told us he was a "good Christian man," I didn't know it then, but I experienced cognitive dissonance, the discomfort of holding two conflicting beliefs. Sure, Grandpa showed up every Sunday and gave generously to the Methodist church, but he was the same man who had beaten his wife, and also his children, my mom and her siblings, until they grew old enough to fight back. If he was a good Christian man, I wanted none of it.

It seemed like everybody turned against the church in the 60's. The joke was that the only people getting married were the proests and the nuns.

So, other than the occasional Hail Mary prayer when I was in dire trouble, I didn't pray. Until I was 62 years old and one of my best friends had an event happen in her brain that prevented her from contacting me. I didn't know what to do, so I put my Reiki hands together and did my awkward best to pray that she would recover.

And do you know what? After about six moths, she contacted me and we set up a get together at her boat on my first day of retirement. We had a fantastic time, and easily slipped back into our comfortable long term friendship.

Soon after that joyful day, I learned that a close relative had stage 3 ovarian cancer. My first response was to pray immediately, my second was to crochet a prayer shawl out of my best yarn: silk, bamboo, cotton, and wool for warmth. The shawl arrived the day of her surgery to remove the cancer, and she wasn't able to sleep that night until she stretched the it the length of her exhausted, aching body and snuggled into it.

Two years later she was cancer free. I knew I was onto something with prayer. I felt that my prayers were linking up with a bigger force somewhere out there. I joined a prayer group called Dawn Prayers, you can find the podcast at the bottom of this page.

The purpose of Dawn Prayers is to offer prayers to those who need them: people in distress, people who feel alone, depressed, disconnected. Commuters who want inspiration on the way to work, caregivers, people new to sobriety. Give a listen to Dawn Prayers, and let me know if you have requests for prayers, talks, or music in the podcast.