Prayer is the one thing that can make a change in your life. If you will go direct to God in simple, affirmative prayer, you can heal your body, bring peace and harmony into your life, and make well-being a reality.
– Emmet Fox, Around the Year, January 10
O God, give me light in my heart and light in my tongue
and light in my hearing and light in my seeing and light
in my feelings and light in every part of my body and light
before me and light behind me. Give me, I beg you,
light on my right hand and light on my left hand and light
above me and light beneath me. O Lord, make light grow
within me and give me light and illuminate me.
-The Prophet Muhammad, from Light the Flame- 365 days of Prayer Andrew Harvey- January 11
“It is not so important how we pray, but from where we pray. Thank you can be enough. I Love You, says it all, and in the silence is the recognition of the infinitude of divine source.”1
From wherever we are -I am- in this moment, I say Thank you! I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of God, except in nature, which is always forgiving, always moving forward, in spite of my errors or successes. Nature is the perfect, unfolding instrument, nay, example of the divine, Mankind, its social experiment.
So, I turn within, and with outstretched hands, I surrender to the will of the divine with faith that Its presence in each of us, the divine within, percolates to the surface as a loving expression of that divinity, offering up new possibility, new direction, and greater transparency in all our institutions and leaders everywhere.
I sit in the silence with only my breath and the beat of my heart and am grateful first and foremost for just that. From that place of gratitude, I know this same breath and beat is repeated 7 billion times a second, maintaining humanity as each of us tries to figure it all out.
I complete my prayer knowing love, compassion, joy and equanimity flows through each emanation of God in Its own time.
In gratitude for this knowing, I move into the flow of life, allowing God to do Its work, and know that it is so.
And so it is.
1 Jim Starke