The Prayer I Didn’t Intend to Write: Day Eleven

This post is part of the Secret Messages Project.  Every day for thirty days, I’ll leave my words in places where they might be found — or might never be found at all.  I hope you’ll join me. 

I didn’t plan to write these words today — I really didn’t.

But this afternoon, in the middle of running errands, I took a wrong turn and ended up on Blenheim Road behind Patrick Henry High School.

And I can’t possibly explain why, but when the woods suddenly loomed to the right of my car, my heart just knew to pull over.

So I did.

I got out of the car and put a box of chalk in the left-hand pocket of my coat.  I tucked my iPhone into my right.  And then I just started walking.

Not ten feet from my car, a path suddenly opened up in the trees.  It wasn’t the Murray Run Greenway, which runs through these woods.  It was the kind of path that forms spontaneously when one or two people walk in the same place regularly.  The grass and underbrush were matted down in a narrow ribbon of smooth ground running straight into the shade.

I took the path.

Twenty or thirty yards in, I spotted an old log just off the trail — old enough that the bark hard worn away to the wood beneath, which was dry and silvery-smooth.

I opened the box of chalk.  Selected a blue stick — the color of a summer sky.  And then I bent down to write.

My first instinct was to compose something pretty — I even had something in mind.  But my heart stopped me again:  keep it simple, Kid.

So I did.  I chalked out the prayer in smooth, even strokes:

Lord, open my eyes to the magic of this day…

That was all…

…And suddenly I realized that my prayer had already been answered.   ❤