Prayer | Sarah Markley

Afraid of the Dark

June 27, 2009 by Sarah Markley 3 Comments

My seven-year-old has just passed the threshold from happy ignorance to informed fear.

She is just now old enough to understand, in a limited way, that there is true and concrete evil in the world. And that scares her.

Bad guys. Monsters. Robbers.

Add to that fires and earthquakes, and I have one scared little girl. This is the girl who used not to be scared of anything. The one who jumped into the pool before she could swim. The one who barreled through the gates of preschool and said, “See ya later, Mom!”

The past several months she has been curious about how safe our home is, if we have an escape plan (oops, put that on my list), what do we do in an earthquake, and if angels really do protect her all night long.

So, I pray with her again. Give her an extra kiss or two and leave the light on in the bathroom. I sing to her and tell her a story. I tell her to pray for peace when she gets scared because that’s the only way I know how to stop being afraid myself.

“Because Mamas are afraid too.”

Really?

“And they get scared and feel alone and wonder if they are the only ones. Mamas get scared of robbers and fires sometimes.”

Really?

“But mostly Mamas worry about their little girls. And then the only thing a Mama can do is to pray for her girls and their safety and that the angels take special care.”

And then what I don’t say is that I get extra scared because of the worst kinds of evil, the kinds I can’t tell her about and hope she never discovers. I can’t tell her that there are real, true things to be genuinely scared of and that only answer is prayer. And faith. And trust. And that in itself is scary.

And then I have to live what I tell her.

Sometimes its hard being a Mama and being afraid of the dark more than she is.

Filed Under: fear, mothering, prayer

Cold Tangerines Giveaway

June 15, 2009 by Sarah Markley 30 Comments

So I mentioned a week or two ago that I had had the chance to do a brief email interview with Shauna Niequist, the author of Cold Tangerines.

And I’ve been rereading parts of her book (that I read awhile ago) recently.
Cold Tangerines is a collection of 40 stories about life and God and the author’s journey through life to find Him. Her writing is polished but conversational, her thinking is intense but absolutely natural, and her ideas are unique but common to the rest of us walking through marriage, motherhood and awareness of God and his goodnesses.

Shauna on Prayer:

Prayer heals all the muscles that I’ve been clenching fro a long time, while I’m holding it together, gritting my teeth, waiting for impact. Prayer, like yoga, like singing, brings soft from hard, pliant from brittle, possible from impossible, warm from cold, breath from breathless. And no matter what gets you there, it is better to be there than not. (CT, pg 149)

Shauna on Babies:

I think babies really do make you believe in God. They make you believe in God because there’s just something beyond understanding about their freshness and fragility and their smell and their toes. When they take their first breaths, and when they land, floppy and slippery, on your chest under the bright overhead light in an otherwise dim delivery room, when you watch their tiny sleeping selves, when you hear their wild animal cries, you know, you just know in your gust that God is real, and that babies have been with him more recently, have come more directly from him than our worn-out old selves have… This is my new prayer, my mother-prayer: Dear God, please please please and thank you thank you thank you. (CT, pg 188)

Shauna on Celebration:

For me, the first part of celebrating is noticing. I find it’s easy for me to get stuck in what’s broken or wrong with a situation instead of seeing the beautiful parts of it, too, or that I move so fast I don’t see anything at all. These days I’m trying to notice everything, to live slowly enough to see what’s unfolding around me, and especially to look for the tiny, beautiful surprises even in the midst of wreckage and ugliness. (from her interview)

Shauna has been more than generous with us. She has given me FOUR signed books to giveaway to my readers. So I am SO EXCITED to be able to host this giveaway this week.

What you have to do? Leave a comment. Please. Right now. Before 10 pm PST on Wednesday, June 17, 2009.

What I have to do? Announce the winners at the end of the week and then send off the books to the winners.

So comment. To win. Now.

Filed Under: babies, celebration, Cold Tangerines, giveaway, prayer, Shauna Niequist

Do Cats Answer Prayers?

February 24, 2009 by Sarah Markley 12 Comments

My youngest is learning to pray.

We pray with her, specifically, in the evenings before I turn out her lights. But she is also learning by watching her sister, her Sunday School teachers, listening to me pray over meals and in the car before I drop her sister off at school.

But I have never, not once prayed to the cat. And neither has my husband or older daughter.

Naomi seems to have, like many verbal three year olds, a slight problem with prepositions. She cannot, at least in prayer, differentiate between “for” and “to”.

So her prayer (to the Christian God, let’s make sure we are all on the same page) sounds something like this:

“Dewwr God,

I pway to Mimi, Papa Rob and to Mamma and Papa. I pway to Hopey and Rosie (the cat) and to Mommy and Daddy. I pway to Chi Chi and to Madelyn and Jordan and Josiah.

AAAmen.”

I don’t know of any Christian tradition, Protestant or Catholic, that advocates prayer to living people (although saintly and righteous) or housebound cats.

Then again, she might be making a three-year-old style statement about society.

Or maybe she’s still just figuring it all out that although it does matter who we pray to, words don’t matter nearly as much as attitude.