Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers

by Anne Lamott

Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.

We can pray for a shot at having a life in which we are present and awake and paying attention and being kind to ourselves.

Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.

God can handle honesty, and prayer begins an honest conversation.

There’s freedom in hitting bottom, in seeing that you won’t be able to save or rescue your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you’ve reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin, because when you’re still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged: the chatter of your mind, the tension of your physiology, all the trunks and wheel-ons you carry from the past. It’s exhausting, crazy-making.

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.”

Side by side with all that, we will witness transformation, people finding out who they were born to be,

If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.

But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

Or you can look at what was revealed in the latest mess, and you say thanks for the revelation, because it shows you some truth you needed to know, and that can be so rare in our families, let alone in our culture, our world, and in our marriages, and in our relationships with our teenagers and with ourselves.

Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides.

How can something so simple be so profound, letting others go first, in traffic or in line at Starbucks, and even if no one cares or notices? Because for the most part, people won’t care—they’re late, they haven’t heard back from their new boyfriend, or they’re fixated on the stock market. And they won’t notice that you let them go ahead of you. They take it as their due. But you’ll know. And it can change your whole day, which could be a way to change your whole life.

The Amen is only as good as the attitude.

“By the time you get on a plane, it’s too late for beggy prayers. It’s time for trust and surrender.”