A Prayer for Chaotic Days
My time is chopped into pieces. I’m needed here and then there. My roles and responsibilities are woven together, back and forth between personal joys and demands and professional opportunities and obligations. I am weary, disoriented and struggling to juggle it all.
I’m not sure how to simplify my life. The only thing that seems to help is when I breathe and put my focus on the Divine. When I do this I am like a dancer with an eye on one focal point, I spin and yet do not become dizzy. Like the moon that travels with the earth we are both racing through the universe with speed and yet there is a feeling of stillness and connection because we spin together.
For the moment, I have given up hope to stop the spinning, and so I offer this prayer.
Loving God,
Who made the universe and all its movement. You guide the path of celestial bodies, planets moving through space thousands of miles an hour, surely you guide my singular little life hurling through responsibilities. Hear my prayer, be here with me, spin with me.
May I look to you to find a way through.
May my efforts be centered in love.
May I pause before showing up for my calls to motherhood and employment, and give myself one, two, even six generous breaths to transition.
May I remember the blessing of being alive.
May I soak in the tender beauty of children gaining independence.
May I feel present to the deep honor to be a guide, chauffeur, companion along the way.
May my mind be agile, flexible, graceful as I step from one role to the next.
May I arrive at each moment with a sense of being carried and led.
May I bring attention and care to whatever/whoever is immediately before me.
May I trust that what does not have my attention is okay without me, that you are working intimately in the lives of others just as you work in my own.
May I be kind to myself about it all, do my best and then not belabor myself with self-doubt, self-criticism, self-loathing.
May I stop resisting and embrace this life before me.
May I release harsh questioning that attempts to investigate my worth on a datasheet of productivity unrelated to the true goals of my life.
May I stop striving to prove my worth through external achievement.
May I be brave to navigate the disappointment of others and not count that as a personal failure of mine, but rather the simple limits of a body moving through time and space.
May I hold on to you as I spin Lord. Spin with me.
If it is your will that I slow down and change my path, hold my hand and show me how that is done.
I am open to changing this way of being and yet feeling like a failure for not knowing how to change does not seem to be the way.
Spin with me, Lord. Reveal to me the place that is still while spinning. Hold my hand. Put your other hand on the small of my back as we move through it all together.
Amen.