It was one of those days that I knew would be mainly sponsored by the words ‘challenging’ and ‘hectic’ with co-sponsorship from the attitude ‘just keep on keeping on’.  There was my usual work to be done with the added bonuses of live data updating (don’t ask, I’m sitting here with the benefit of hindsight convinced that my numbers never added up all day) and phone support for the team I work with.  In short, a day of unpredictability on a day when I needed uninterrupted time to focus, assess, synthesize and communicate.  

I knew ahead of time that it wouldn’t be a normal day and the challenges of the day were all anticipated but neither fact made the day any easier,  It’s been a long campaign, living and working with this virus and I’ve found one way to cope is to have that one day at work each week which is mostly predictable and takes me away from the coalface and out into the real world for a bit.  I lost all of this and while it was only for one day, the loss was keenly felt.

But then, life happened and because it’s 2020, a photo was taken.

It was morning prayer time when I arrived for the first of my visits.  So I stood to the side of the corridor, bowed my head and prayed.  The Lord’s Prayer, a Catholic prayer and finally a prayer in Arabic reverberated around me.

I felt so many things in those minutes of stillness.  

Strengthened.

Soothed.

Restored.

Acknowledged.

Revived.

It was the peacefulness that diffused through the air as the prayers were spoken.  That familiar beginning of the Lord’s Prayer.  The cadence of the Catholic Prayer gently urging me onward.  There’s something deeply nurturing about the cadence of a language you don’t understand when it is spoken in prayer.

Do you have a backstory to something you did this week?