Category Archives: Daily Prayers

Frank Jones could tell a storm was coming, so he rushed his evening chores, and even turned the horses out to pasture without feeding them first. He had barely gotten back into the house when his wife told him “There’s a cyclone coming.” She had seen it on the hill south of the Hoskin’s place.Continue reading “Daily Prayer, 20 May”

It seems to me that talk about GOATs in sports is limited to basketball and football, though once in a while in baseball you hear about the greatest hitter of all time. What I never hear about is an NHL GOAT. Maybe that’s because it is almost without dispute that Wayne Gretzky is the greatestContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 19 May”

When deployment after deployment is conducted without significant incident, crews begin to think nothing can happen, which was the primary failure of the crew of the USS Stark. Thus, we often offer reminders of just how dangerous our work is, and particularly that work in the places where we deploy. One of those places, byContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 17 May”

Rutland, VT is a small town nestled in a hollow of the Green Mountains along Otter Creek, which flows north from there into Lake Champlain. It’s a beautiful spot and it was where John was born and grew up. He started college in Middlebury, some 45 miles downstream, but didn’t take long to decide thatContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 12 May”

This prayer was another opportunity to add depth to a holiday that many of our crew knew only as an excuse to drink beer, something that couldn’t be done underway on deployment anyway. It so happened that during one deployment, during COVID, it did not pass unobserved that Cinco de Mayo fell on Taco Tuesday,Continue reading “Daily Prayer, 5 May”

We often aren’t aware of the reputations that we are building until it’s too late. The only way I know of to control one’s own reputation is to set standards of behavior for oneself. Select the kind of person you want to be, and then measure all of your decisions—big and small—by whether or notContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 2 May”

Sailors are encouraged to have a questioning attitude. It may be that a particular Sailor is the only one who sees a threat or an impending mistake, and it is imperative that he or she is free to speak up and ask the question. No matter how questioning is encouraged, however, it is often theContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 1 May”

It’s been a while since I have, so I thought I’d share another poem. You all may have heard of E.E. Cummings, the early 20th century poet noted for using neither capitalization nor punctuation. What tends to be most striking about his poems, however, is his syntax. The way he structured his phrases and orderedContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 27 April”

On the island of Sicily, one of the islands that we blew right past on our way through the Mediterranean—it’s the one that looks as though it is being kicked by the boot of Italy—there is a city called Syracuse. Much older than the American city of the same name, it goes back three millennia.Continue reading “Daily Prayer, 26 April”

It has seemed to me that as more young men and women lose touch with religion of any kind, they also lose a sense of meaning in life, and certainly with the concept that they have any inherent value. This makes it very difficult for them to cope with difficult circumstances in their lives. InContinue reading “Daily Prayer, 24 April”