Healing touch of prayer

Was taught about God when I was young

Many hymns in His praise I had sung

Was taught to fold my hands and pray

At the start and the end of my day

It was easy to whisper without comprehension

A prayer I was taught, but difficult to pay attention

Over the years I got conditioned to pray

 

For the Almighty to show me the way

Whenever I felt the pangs of fear

Whenever my loved ones were not near

Prayer was a means of distraction

Especially during times of fearful inaction

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I do not know when I got desensitized

To the effects of prayer, but somewhere I realized

I could not pray even in stressful situations

I could not close my eyes and exercise patience

 

As a physician when I met with illness and death

I became a skeptic, in prayer I lost all faith

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Faced with a personal tragedy one day

In desperation I invoked God and tried to pray

It was not easy, I could not concentrate

At first, but I persisted, I was desperate

An inner calm finally descended on me

A silver lining to dark clouds I could see

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For prayer is not for God but for mortals like me

To calm us, give confidence in times of misery

To loosen the strings that bind us to fear

From the web of emotions, prayer can our mind clear.