I once heard someone say that prayer is more than words. It's a stance you take, a position you claim. You throw your body against the door to keep the demons from advancing and stay put until they go away.
Interpretation
Prayer is an action and a commitment, not just spoken words.
This quote by Regina Brett emphasizes that prayer goes beyond merely uttering words; it requires a firm commitment and a proactive stance against life's challenges. It suggests that prayer is an earnest effort to protect oneself from negative influences and to maintain personal strength and resolve in difficult times.
In practice
Sharing this quote during a community gathering to inspire collective resolve.
When you have cancer, it's like you enter a new time zone: the Cancer Zone. Everything in the Tropic of Cancer revolves around your health or your sickness. I didn't want my whole life to revolve around cancer. Life came first; cancer came second.
Greet every morning with open arms and say thanks every night with a full heart. Each day is a precious gift to be savored and used, not left unopened and hoarded for a future that may never come.
The only gift my dad ever bought me is still in my jewelry box. It died at 10 minutes to 11 decades ago, but the gold Caravelle watch keeps my dad alive. A watch isn't about keeping time. It's about stopping it.
Before I started chemotherapy treatments, I wrote down the best advice from doctors, family, friends, books, and survivors and created an 'Owner's Manual' to help me take care of myself. It would remind me that cancer is doable.
Some people hate funerals. I find them comforting. They hit the pause button on life and remind us that it has an end. Every eulogy reminds me to deepen my dash, that place on the tombstone between our birth and our death.
Cancer is messy and scary. You throw everything at it, but don't forget to throw love at it. It turns out that might be the best weapon of all.
Commonplaceness, the surrender to the average, that good which is not bad but still the enemy of the best - That is our besetting danger.
Liberty of speech invites and provokes liberty to be used again, and so bringeth much to a man's knowledge.
You are who you are at this moment because of everything that's ever happened to you, everything that you carried forward for yourself.
It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.
When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.
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