Opening Prayer

By Andrea Lingle

I share a home office with my husband. He has a desk in a dark cherry stain that has a glass top and matching credenzas. He keeps his desk tidy. I have a heirloom oak roll-top desk that was my dad’s. It has lots of little cubbies. It would be rude not to keep stuff in them. Does that negate tidiness? Well, yes. I am not very tidy. On our bookshelves we have lots of the things you would expect to find in an office shared by a pastor and a writer. Bibles, dictionaries, church mothers and fathers, poetry books, and lots of notebooks. One whole shelf has nothing but little prayer books. Celtic prayer, common prayer, daily prayer, guided prayer. Thirty-four inches of prayer opportunities. Why do these books get written? Why did we buy them? Was it to teach us to pray or to convince ourselves that we, at one point, tried? Is it to inspire us or did we think that somehow the purchase of the book achieved the aim? Whatever this shelf reveals or disguises, one of the books that lives on this shelf gives me courage. It is a tiny little thing. I have read the whole little thing several times, but the title is the best part: Always We Begin Again. 

Today. This very moment. We begin. Again. No matter what, you get that burden and privilege. 

We must do it all again. For the length of our lives, our hearts and lungs are tasked with beating and breathing again and again and again. Our hands are filled with repeated tasks. Today flows from yesterday, but it is not completed. Not yet. While no one will argue that their time traversing the wind and sky is infinite, apparently dishes are. The dailyness of life can wear away at one until it feels like an unending list of “to-do”s. Each tic box resisting completion. The ink that is used to check the box somehow morphs into a new box requiring checking off. The socks that get folded today get worn tomorrow and folded and worn and folded and worn until one goes missing. 

But, also, we always get to begin again. Today hasn’t been done yet. Of course, beginning again doesn’t mean that there will, necessarily, be something new, it just means we get a fresh shot at it. This brings me back to the shelf of prayer books. As beautiful as some of them are, as earnestly written as most of them are, as enduring as many of them are, they do not enact the life of prayer. They can facilitate prayer, but the only way that one can lead a life of prayer is by waking up every day and beginning again. How? you ask? The same way as socks and dishes and lungs and hearts. How can the unending tasks become unceasing prayer? There are a million little ways. Write the Touchstone prayer on the back of your hand and use it as a breath prayer until the dish water washes it off. As you fold the socks, let the motion of your hands become a blessing. Can these tasks become prayer? Only one day at a time.

Shall we begin?

Again.