The thing about praying five times a day is that it gives you five distinct opportunities to talk to God. To bow and ask for forgiveness, even if you’re only returning after an hour. I was bad at sticking to a prayer schedule as a child. When you are young, and everything outside is beckoning, it’s hard to not look at that which brings you inside as a task and nothing else. But I appreciated the idea and routine of it, nonetheless. Even when it didn’t feel useful, the persistence of bringing myself before some higher power and asking to be made clean, again and again.
