What I Pray

Peace. I pray for peace.

Not national peace. Not global peace. Those concepts would be nice, but they are too big for my head to comprehend. No human has ever seen world peace. I don’t even know what it would look like.

So what I pray for is small peace. Tiny, microscopic, unnoticeable-to-the-naked-eye peace.

I’m familiar with this kind. Because I’ve felt it before. So have you. It’s not a completely rare sensation. It’s an inner stillness, beginning in your chest, working its way into your whole body.

Sometimes you feel this peace in the early mornings, before everyone is awake. For a brief moment, without reason, you’re simply not worried about normal crap. You’re not stressed or frightened. In fact, you’re not even wearing pants.

You’re just cool. Everything is cool. Life is cool. God is cool. It’s all cool.

That.

That’s what I’m praying for. Because a guy at peace doesn’t think the same as regular people. Regular people are not at peace. Regular people are terrified. And do you know WHY we’re all afraid?

Me neither.

What the hell are we so scared of?

But we are most DEFINITELY afraid of something. You can see it all over our faces. Hear it in our voices. Fear. It’s in our TV shows, social media posts, and even in the faces of our kids, who try so hard to fit in, tirelessly trying to keep up with the rest of the mainstream crowd, even though that crowd has the collective IQ of mayonnaise.

I ask myself, what are they afraid of? Moreover, why do we always need to be right? Why are we constantly playing games of one-upmanship? Why are we always looking out for Number One instead of looking out for Number Two, Number Three, or Number Fifty-Six-Point-Two?

Why do we think “more” is better? Why is workaholism a virtue? Why do we praise a person working on a PhD, but look down on the kid who is learning to become a stick welder?

Why is “different” so threatening? How many streaming service subscriptions does one person actually need to find inner joy?

How can there be 400,000 foster kids in the US, looking for homes, while 204 million individuals identify as religious Christian?

I don’t know. And I don’t care, really. Because right now, I’m at peace.

I don’t know how long this peace will last. My day hasn’t even started yet. Soon, my day will begin. Soon, I’ll be using big, adulty words like “automotive insurance deductible” in ordinary conversation.

But right now—just for right now—I feel peace. And it’s powerful stuff, this peace. If I were able to share it, people might know what I was talking about.

Then, maybe they’d see. They’d want to share it with others. From person to person. It would spread, sort of like a virus, or a communicable disease, or a photo of Taylor Swift walking her dog.

If it spread, this peace would eventually take hold of random people’s hearts. Infiltrating their defenses, spreading even more. Soon, it would unfurl itself across the Atlantic, whisking throughout the Northern Hemisphere, across the Mediterranean, eastward into Asia, flying through the wilds of Africa. All the way to Timbuktu.

And everyone on the planet would realize that there is nothing to be afraid of. There is only love. That’s all there has ever been. That’s all there ever will be. All you have to do is reach out and touch it.

Anyway, I don’t know.

Maybe I’m praying for world peace after all.