November 2011

This is really a husband-and-wife story. I’ll connect it to prayer, but first the marriage part.

It happens at least once a week. I’ll be in the middle of dinner, in the middle of an interesting story, and Carol, bless her, will gaze across at me and point to her lip. I know the signal all too well. It means, “There’s something on your lip, some spaghetti sauce or gravy or chocolate ice cream got stuck there. Wipe it off, please.”

Today during lunch I darted into a church near the office for a few quiet minutes. The place is dark, mostly empty, and smells of incense, plaster and candles. Usually I say a prayer or two and find some peace, but today I was feeling out of sorts and irritated. I sat in a pew and reached for some exalted language, then stopped myself. Exalted would have been phony.

My dad was a veteran of World War II and proud of it. He served on a submarine through two war patrols in the Pacific.

This post was written by guest blogger Sabra Ciancanelli, editor of OurPrayer.

It's not even Thanksgiving and already the Christmas catalogs have started to fill my mailbox. My youngest son, Henry, eagerly sits down with a stack of them. His eyes fill with possibility as he scans the pages with a marker in his hand. "I need this!" he says, circling a toy. "I need this!"



Tourists are flooding into New York to run the marathon on Sunday. May the skies be kind to them. Lucky it wasn’t last week, or they would have been dodging tree limbs and piles of snow.