Pray daily.

Gentle Reader,

It is a simple rule I follow. Pray daily. Some days, it is difficult to pray. Struggling with illness and the challenges of daily life, prayer is easy to forget. It is easy to forget to give thanks when you are eyeballs deep in dishes and the children are fighting. It is easy to forget to bless Deity when your life is hard and you are just trying to get through a single day successfully. It is especially easy to forget that prayer is not just about saying thank you and praising the gods.

Prayer can also be complaints and expressing anger. There is a long history of it. My prayers of late have been questioning why we have been struggling so hard. They have been lamentations over the problems that have been facing my family and friends. And, some of my prayers have been angry demands that my problems be solved.

Prayer is not always gentle, serene, and filled with blessings. It is a conversation between ourselves and the Divine. Sometimes it is angry, painful, and filled with complaints. And that is ok because it is real. Relationships, even with the Divine, are going to have rocky times and there are going to be times where we are going to be seeking someone to just vent about the issues troubling us. Those are legitimate things to pray about.