Today’s Prayer to Passage will be from the book ‘Once A Runner’ by John L. Parker Jr.

Today I pray, “Dear God, When I forget what it is that I love about prayer and writing, I know I am overdue for a return to self. Prayer and journaling have come more naturally to me than nearly anything else I know of in life. When I’ve lost prayer and journaling, I’ve turned myself in completely to paying off student loans with the job that does only that, allowing television ads to define who I should be, and listening to any commanding voice other than my own. I’ve sold out to the ridiculous. Enough of that.
I am not, nor will I become, a runner. But I can get the grand commitment, the purity passion. I know the loyalty a runner who titles one’s self a runner feels. Because I feel that as a prayer. Thank you so much for that feeling, God. It fills my life with purpose and movement, for which I can account in a turn of events since my mid-twenties as the greatest purpose I could have ever imagined — when my husband walked away from his vows, my future children and grandchildren dissipated, and I was left alone with You.
Thank You for blessing a divorce and a canceling of motherhood with something of momentous velocity. Thank You for using me. Thank You for choosing me. Thank You for telling me that I was the one when I certainly couldn’t convince myself of such a notion. I am forever Yours. And I love You with forever love. Amen.”

Following my prayer, I held the closed book in my hands and opened it to this passage:

“Quento Cassidy knew what the mystic-runners, the joggers, the runner-poets, the Zen runners and others of their ilk were saying. But he also knew that their euphoric selves were generally nowhere to be seen on dark, rainy mornings. They primarily wanted to talk it, not do it. Cassidy very early understood that a true runner ran even when he didn’t feel like it, and raced when he was supposed to, without excuses and with nothing held back. He ran to win, would die in the process if necessary, and was unimpressed by those who disavowed such a base motivation. ‘You are not allowed to renounce that which you never possessed,’ he thought.”
—JOHN L. PARKER JR.

And so it goes with our heartfelt promises to ourselves. No one else owns our promises. And when we, ourselves, do not possess our own contributions — present or future — we do not abandon them; they were simply not ours to complete. This existence is not an attempt. This existence is a good force of will, and if we obtain a crossing-over to contributing even a small portion of our free will to the miraculous purpose God creates of it, we, in turn, become the creators.