Help
Sometimes all you can do is pray, “Help.”
There is freedom in hitting bottom. That is where restoration can begin.
"I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, with no proof, that my grandfather prayed for all of us kids. And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.”
“The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. / I awoke and saw that life was service. / I acted and behold, service was joy.”
“Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don’t make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit. God tells Job, who wants an explanation for all his troubles, “You wouldn’t understand.”
Three terrible truths about our existence: We are so ruined; we are so loved; we are in charge of so little.
Three things I cannot change: the past, the truth, and you.
She talks about famous prayers: the serenity prayer and others. Here is her prayer.
“I wrote one that will do in a pinch:
Hi, God.
I am just a mess.
It is all hopeless.
What else is new?
I would be sick of me, if I were You, but miraculously You are not.
I know I have no control over other people’s lives, and I hate this. Yet I believe that if I accept this and surrender, You will meet me wherever I am.
Wow. Can this be true? If so, how is this afternoon—say, two-ish?
Thank You in advance for Your company and blessings.
You have never once let me down.
Amen.”
“Praying “Help” means that we ask that Something give us the courage to stop in our tracks, right where we are, and turn our fixation away from the Gordian knot of our problems. We stop the toxic peering and instead turn our eyes to something else: to our feet on the sidewalk, to the middle distance, to the hills, whence our help comes—someplace else, anything else. Maybe this is a shift of only eight degrees, but it can be a miracle.”
Excerpt From: Anne Lamott. “Help, Thanks, Wow.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/OOnmG.l