It's a cool, beautiful day. A cool date - 05/05/05. And it's also the National Day of Prayer...time to pray. About anything...and anyone.
The folks we love. The folks we find it hard to love. The folks we think are a slice of heaven. And the folks we think should go to Hell.
My heart says I should be praying for that last group most of all, somehow. Not that God should change them - but change my heart about them.
My first sponsor, speaking at an AA meeting on my 5th sobriety birthday, said, "I'm supposed to love you all...because you're God's kids. But the simple fact is that there's a middlin' few of you that I can tolerate, some days. And there's some of you I just won't warm up to - even if we are cremated together."
Our instructions for daily living include the words "Pray without ceasing." That goes double (!) for today, I guess.
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I just finished reading Karen Armstrong's THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE, a book a new Muslim friend recommended. Great book and especially if you hang on to the end. The last fifty or so pages will blow you away. Did me, anyway.
One remark she made that struck me as key was that the Arabic word transliterated as "kafir" and usually translated as "unbeliever" is perhaps more accurately translated as "ungrateful person." Wow!
So National Prayer Day is a call to believers to be what they are to be, people of gratitude. When some believers are casting themselves as the (only) people of faith, it is good for us all to be reminded we are to be people of humble gratitude, and never people of hate.
I guess gratitude even for those people we have most trouble warming up to, like maybe some of the people of faith? Somehow God loves them, and God has so much more right than I do to be disappointed in them, I suspect. And in me.
"Help!" in the morning. "Thank you!" at night. And maybe both of them unceasingly in between.
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