Note: Today was my first day in a couple of years without my Leica, and I missed it, but I also looked forward to the challenge. Could I still make it work with my perfect Iphone 15 Pro Max? My new camera should arrive by the end of the week or early next week. I was pleased with the outcome. It worked before and works now. It’s a different feeling, but still with plenty of emotion.  Loss and gain are twins. Me.

When I was alone at the first Bedlam Farm and freshly divorced, I had a wicked breakdown that almost did me in. A Presbyterian Minister took me under his wing, and once a week, we met and prayed together, or rather, he prayed for me to accept Jesus and join the church. I think he knew that was unlikely, but “I’m a Jesus guy,” he said often. He knew who he was and brought me back to life.

And he was a Jesus guy, not just a talker. Often, he would come out with me on my hospice visits with people who wanted to get baptized at the last minute, just in case. If they didn’t seem real, he wouldn’t do it. He was a person of genuine faith, kind at heart, steel of conviction.

I was the only exception he made about Jesus, and we became very good friends. At our last meeting, when he was going to another Church, he asked me if I had decided what I wanted to be.

I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “I want to be a prayer.”

He liked that. You are an odd one, he said. If you can’t pray, you become a prayer. He smiled. Like all genuine people of faith, he has a soft heart for odd people.

All my life, I’ve been pecked at by the people who don’t like strange people. They are always targets.  He never did that. He thought odd people were sacred in some way. He said they gave him a chance to be faithful.

I said I thought I had to be religious to pray, and he laughed and shook his head. Prayer, he said, is not a technique. It’s an attitude, a state of mind, a quality of soul, and a dimension of the daily. I pray often, not every day, and I think of what he said about prayer. It was very wise, and I think especially of the line about a dimension of the daily.

I’ve learned that anybody can pray anytime.