Today's
Quotation:
The minds of people are
so cluttered up with everyday living these days
that they
don’t, or won’t, take time out for a little prayer–-
for mental cleansing, just as they take a bath for a
physical,
outer cleaning.
Both are necessary.
Jo Ann Carlson
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Today's
Meditation:
Somehow
or another, prayer becomes some sort of a chore as we grow
up. It's something that our parents make us do, and
because it's usually highly formalized, it has little appeal
to young people who instinctively know better, I think--
they know that the more we formalize anything, the
less personal and valuable it becomes.
But
prayer is our opportunity to connect with the higher aspects
of life-- our higher power, our God, our own spirits.
And prayer helps us to keep in mind that our worlds and our
being aren't limited to what we see around us in our limited
perspective of this world.
If
we can look at prayer for what it is-- connection with a
higher power-- it loses much of its unpleasant side. It
becomes something that we do for ourselves, and whatever we
do to make our own lives better and richer ends up helping
all of the people with whom we share our lives. Prayer
helps us put to rest things that need to be put to rest,
such as resentment and anger, and it helps us to make other
parts of ourselves, such as peace and compassion, much
stronger.
Prayer
doesn't have to be formalized. It doesn't have to be
done on our knees in a darkened room-- some of my best
prayers have happened on long walks at night, under
beautiful star-filled skies, or on long drives with the
music off and the windows wide open. My prayers tend
to be more like conversations, and I try very hard to listen
for answers, too-- there's no law saying that all prayers are
one-sided, and it's a shame that we've come so far from God
that we feel that he never tries to tell us anything.
If
you want to do something nice for yourself today, try a
little prayer. A sincere little prayer in which you
talk about the things that really matter to you, and about
which you won't have any preconceived notions of what should
happen. The more you talk things over with God, the
less those things will bug you as you go through your life
trying to become the person you're meant to be.
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