In the quiet hum of childhood, I learned to live among the shattered edges of chaos—where dinner plates cracked as easily as voices, where love bruised more often than it healed. We were all ghosts in that house, haunting each other, speaking in the broken language of survival. Prayer was something I stole glimpses of, like an old hymn from a half-forgotten dream. It was not taught to me but whispered in the gaps between screams, in the moments when I would press my hands together—not out of devotion, but desperation.
What is prayer, but the search for silence in the storm? A hope that rises like a thin, trembling line from the gut to the sky. As a child, I didn’t know what I was reaching for, only that I needed something outside of this—this wreckage we called home. Maybe I prayed to be seen, or maybe to disappear, to be anything but the girl who knew too much of rage and too little of tenderness.
But prayer isn’t always answered in the way we expect, is it? I wasn’t plucked from the turmoil; no hand came down to pull me from the fire. Instead, prayer became the fire itself—burning away the fear, the doubt, the jagged memories. It became the only quiet place inside me, a place where I could lay down the weight of it all, if only for a breath.
In the darkness of those nights, when the world outside was loud and cruel, I learned that peace is not something you are given—it’s something you carve out, claw by claw, from the inside. And maybe that’s what prayer is. Not a request, not a plea, but a declaration: I will not be undone by this. I will find my way through the dark.
So, I pray. Even now, after all these years, I pray—not for salvation, not for rescue, but for strength. I’m learning how to do it better each day. How to get closer to myself and to God. To keep going, to keep breathing, to keep believing that somewhere beneath the rubble of a broken past, there is something whole waiting to be found.
B 🤍
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