Keep Moving - LJ Idol, Season 8, Week 1
I'll admit that when I first saw this topic, I was stumped. What was it supposed to mean, "When you pray, move your feet?" I grew up Catholic. When we pray, we remained firmly on our knees. I tried talking it out with Rich, but he was as stumped for ideas as I was.
Then, as one should do with a good puzzle (or any of Gary's topics), I turned it on it's side and looked at it from a different direction. It was then that I realized that I DO move my feet when I pray. And what's more, I do it in two different ways.
The first ties in with what prayer has meant to me since realizing that I am agnostic. I don't just sit down and pray. When I was a practicing Catholic, I said my prayers nightly. I knelt in church and gave my dutiful prayers to God. But I don't pray like that anymore. My prayers are reserved for the times when something is going really wrong and I desperately want it to come out right. I think the last time I prayed was when we found out that my husband had colon cancer last spring. And my prayers happened not while lying in bed or sitting at the computer, but while I was walking toward the hospital on the day of his surgery. I prayed while I was on the move, because if I stopped to pray, I'd also stop to think. And when I start thinking on the bad, all the negative comes the forefront. So I walk and pray, walk and hope, walk and want things to be better. Quirk? Maybe. But it's what I do.
The second is more a philosophy than taking the words literally. It is by following the well-known philosophy, "God helps those who help themselves." And it's what I try to do for most things, because I can't just sit back and do nothing. I can't send my prayers up to whichever higher being happens to be listening at the time and hope that they'll agree that my plight should be changed. I can't leave it in someone else's hands. I need to take responsibility for what is happening in my life.
Using my husband's cancer as an example, yes, I prayed. I sent every thought I could to the universe at large in the hopes that we wouldn't find more cancer in his colon when we went to look. But we didn't just pray. We talked to the doctors, listened to their advice and agreed that going in for surgery to have a portion of his colon removed (the portion where the cancer was found) would be what we needed to do. It turned out that there was no cancer anywhere else (at least thus far) and we were lucky. But if we had said, "You know, family history says that he won't get another occurrence and they probably got it all when they removed the polyp anyway," who knows what would have happened. Instead of a small portion of his colon, he could have lost the whole thing. So we said our prayers and then did what we could to make our own wishes come true at the same time.
It's important not to stand still. Not to wait for the outcome you want or wait for someone else to make what you want happen for you. There's no reason that you can't work in tandem with the higher power you believe in, but you do have to work as well. After all, it's your life. You need to chose the path to walk.
Then, as one should do with a good puzzle (or any of Gary's topics), I turned it on it's side and looked at it from a different direction. It was then that I realized that I DO move my feet when I pray. And what's more, I do it in two different ways.
The first ties in with what prayer has meant to me since realizing that I am agnostic. I don't just sit down and pray. When I was a practicing Catholic, I said my prayers nightly. I knelt in church and gave my dutiful prayers to God. But I don't pray like that anymore. My prayers are reserved for the times when something is going really wrong and I desperately want it to come out right. I think the last time I prayed was when we found out that my husband had colon cancer last spring. And my prayers happened not while lying in bed or sitting at the computer, but while I was walking toward the hospital on the day of his surgery. I prayed while I was on the move, because if I stopped to pray, I'd also stop to think. And when I start thinking on the bad, all the negative comes the forefront. So I walk and pray, walk and hope, walk and want things to be better. Quirk? Maybe. But it's what I do.
The second is more a philosophy than taking the words literally. It is by following the well-known philosophy, "God helps those who help themselves." And it's what I try to do for most things, because I can't just sit back and do nothing. I can't send my prayers up to whichever higher being happens to be listening at the time and hope that they'll agree that my plight should be changed. I can't leave it in someone else's hands. I need to take responsibility for what is happening in my life.
Using my husband's cancer as an example, yes, I prayed. I sent every thought I could to the universe at large in the hopes that we wouldn't find more cancer in his colon when we went to look. But we didn't just pray. We talked to the doctors, listened to their advice and agreed that going in for surgery to have a portion of his colon removed (the portion where the cancer was found) would be what we needed to do. It turned out that there was no cancer anywhere else (at least thus far) and we were lucky. But if we had said, "You know, family history says that he won't get another occurrence and they probably got it all when they removed the polyp anyway," who knows what would have happened. Instead of a small portion of his colon, he could have lost the whole thing. So we said our prayers and then did what we could to make our own wishes come true at the same time.
It's important not to stand still. Not to wait for the outcome you want or wait for someone else to make what you want happen for you. There's no reason that you can't work in tandem with the higher power you believe in, but you do have to work as well. After all, it's your life. You need to chose the path to walk.