Tag: prayers

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March 15: 12:28-12:59 Ides of March Prayer

For today and the next four days, three of my writing groups intersect. As part of The Stafford Challenge, I have committed to writing a poem every day for a year. In the Slice of Life Writing Challenge, we blog every day for the month of March, and for Ethicalela’s Open Write, today’s prompt drives the writing for the other groups as well.

Leilya Pitre of Louisiana’s prompt at http://www.ethicalela.com can be read in full here. She inspires us to write poems about the Ides of March with its foreboding feeling of doom.. While my time slice today is 12:28-12:59, I can tell you that during that 31-minute segment of my day, I’ll be praying and moving plants indoors and securing outdoor furniture to prepare for the storms my daughter is experiencing this morning in Owensboro, Kentucky that are heading our way this evening. Everyone has been anticipating and preparing for these storms all week. Right now, I’m praying for my children who are enduring baseball-size hail and 70 mph winds in their first round this morning.

I made up my own poetry form today. I chose to write an Ides of March Time and Date poem, using the time of her text and the date as my line formations. My daughter sent a text at 5:51 on 3/15, so six lines have that many words in that order. 5-5-1-3-1-5.

An Ides of March Prayer

her text: pray for us~

high winds, hail upon us

{praying}

daughter, fiance, grandson

{praying}

Lord, keep them all safe

Screenshot

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Surgery Day – A Visit from Her Mimi

Throughout her life, my mother loved birds. Songbirds, water birds, and birds of prey. She could spot a hawk from a mile off, as if she’d had some inner sensor alerting her to their presence.

My brother Ken and I often share pictures of hawks when they manifest themselves to us, especially on significant dates – birthdays, holidays, or times of concern. We often mention that we saw Mom sitting on a wire by the highway making sure our seatbelts were fastened and our doors were locked.

My children often share how much she meant to them – taking them to Dairy Queen for Cotton Candy Blizzards, making strawberry figs in the kitchen, taking walks along the beach. They called her Mimi.

Imagine the deep feeling of comfort when my daughter and I were leaving for the hospital from our hotel this morning and noticed, resting on the wire directly above the car, a hawk – seeing us off, assuring us that her spirit was right here with us in these tense moments of anticipating surgery. A tonsillectomy is rough surgery for an adult, but Mom’s spirit affirmed for us that we are on the way to better days ahead.

I’d parked the car with her guidance the night before. That inner voice told me, arriving after dark, to park near a light – not on the back side of the building, as had been suggested by hotel staff at check-in. I followed that voice. She is always steering me in all the right ways, right down to parking the car for safety and so she’d have a wire for a better morning greeting.

Even brief appearances and signs bring deep comfort to us! Mom knew how much this hello from Heaven would mean to us.