How did this happen? I finally came to the realization that I would accept this resolution to pray for a stranger everyday. Followed that up with acknowledging I would relent and write the stories down, that my agent would sell the book , that I would travel coast to coast on a whirlwind book tour. What I never really accepted was that the book was mine. Seriously. I’m a southern author. Literary pretty much. Mystical in a southern heat lightning God’s on the other side of the line kind of way. And I love every line of those novels I’ve written. I love the characters and settings. Love visiting them as I’m writing as if I have taken a step back in time or stepped into another city. And that was my life plan. To keep on writing novels, rather quietly thank you very much (outside of book tours and book festivals) in the woods outside of Nashville. It was never my plan to have a “ministry of prayer”. So, after a recent visit to speak at the Methodist Women’s Dinner in Tupelo and the beautiful Holland Park Church of Christ in the Greenville, SC area, and with numerous invitations to visit and speak at churches of all denominations I’m caught staring out the window and contemplating. After sharing so many stories from the Praying for Strangers collection, after speaking on prayer and its inherent potential to change us, lift us up and connect us one person at a time – I had to pull back and reconsider my full life plans. People write me notes and say blessings over this ministry of mine. When they say ‘ministry’ my first inclination is to look over my shoulder to see who their talking about. Those prayers aren’t unwelcome by any means, or unwarrented in their need – but surprising in their catagory. That’s just being honest and we might as well be, right? I could choose a lot of people that would be so open and wanting to spend their life doing exactly that – in the ministry of some sort – and  it being in public to boot. Me, not so much. I’m a Gulf Coast transplant Tennessee writer girl. And being a writer girl is how I’ve envisioned my life for the most part since 6th grade when I was officially tagged as a writer by my teacher. Yes, I thought, this suits me so well. The first thing I wrote was a poem about a cat hunting in the dark. Gathered me kudos and ooh’s, and ahhh’s. Following that little masterpiece was a few assignment type pieces – write about food, about the air, about the taste of salt. But a few weeks later I wrote something different. Something that came from a deeper place in my soul, and one of the first pieces I ever wrote of my own accord without a specific topic.

It was a prayer.

My father was serving at the time in Vietnam and what I knew was that we sent him boxes, waited for letters, and tuned in avidly to the nightly news of the war which was never good. The prayer was a type of poem but I don’t remember it rhyming. It was about war, and soldiers gone, and about those who waited for their return. But it was definitely a prayer. It was read by my teacher in the chapel held on Wednesday’s where I went to school. I asked her to read it anonymously if she wanted to read it which for some reason irritated her but she read it simply saying written by one of my students.

Year’s later the priest of tiny, Episcopal church I grew up in asked me to write a poem for an anniversary celebration of the chapel. He read it and said, “Well, this is really a prayer not a poem – but it’s good.” Ok.

Flash forward through a lot of years of playwriting, novel writing, story capturing in general and you find me right where I am. A women of prayer who never meant to write about or talk about it. But as I look back, that’s what I’ve been doing since the beginning and sporatiaclty through time. As I spoke at the Hoover Library the other night, and was so blessed to have author friends join me for the evening, I centered on the fact that the future doesn’t often turn out the way we had planned. Not so often. And I assure you what appears to be the path before me is not the one that I had envisioned. A Pulitzer Prize for Southern fiction, sure. (And you can insert the happy face here  - because after all wouldn’t that make Momma happy? Ok. And your’s truly even happier?) And although I’m working on a new novel I love and have two more waiting in the wings to be written, those characters alive in my imagination and waiting – I have finally relented to the realization that something larger than my initial dreams is happening. That the book Praying for Strangers has taken on a life of it’s own, that it’s touching people in ways I never imagined. And that when they whisper in my ear that they had found hope, when they turn to a stranger in the store and say “How are you today,” and really mean it, when they stop to pay for a single mom’s groceries who comes up dollars short in the line – all real events happening because of people reading the book, I’ll choose that any day.

A ministry of prayer? I’ll have to google that. See if those boots feel like they fit. (And most likely they really, really do.)  But I can assure you of this – a ministry of people becoming more aware of the living moment, more dedicated to promoting the good, more compassionate, and more human – you can charge me with those ministries any day of the week.

And Prayer itself? Oh, I’ll take yours for me and mine any day of the week. Seriously.