A Child’s Prayer
By Louise S. Jenkins
Dear Lord of Love I feel you near
And know that through the coming night
You will guide my dreams and keep me safe
To Wake up in the morning light
I am just a little girl, dear Lord
But I pray with each new day
To make somebody happier
And not quarrel when I play.
Thank you dear Lord for all the joys
And the blessings you have given me,
Forgive the naughty things I do
And help me Lord, to be like you.
Written by my maternal grandmother, a woman I never knew except through these words, I grew up reciting this prayer every night at bedtime.
And this was odd, as my mother didn’t go to any church or send us to any Sunday school, nor did she have anything much positive to say about God, when she said anything on the topic of religion in general.
“My mother,” my mother informed me when I was five or six, “wrote this poem because she so disliked the prayer that was then in fashion for all the little children to pray at their bedtime.” She would then recite all or part of the offending prayer which went something like this:
‘Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.’
“Imagine!” Mother would exclaim, “imbuing young minds like yours with thoughts of death as they set off to dreamland!”
My mother really talked like this to me. Maybe, being her fourth child, she was simply tired of having to accommodate her vocabulary for a child. By sixth grade, I could beat her at Scrabble.
“So,” Mother continued each time she proudly recited the tale of our prayer’s origins, “she simply decided to write something more uplifting and appropriate. It was even published.”
I came to understand, as I grew older, that my Mother’s gripe with God was probably because our prayer’s author, a devoutly religious and, by all accounts, sweet young mother, fell to an early and untimely death — quite traumatic for my mother, then a 10-year old child herself. She held God responsible and found him untrustworthy. Repudiated him from then on yet making sure her mother’s words lived on.
But I only came to this insight much later, after years of earnestly endeavoring, as instructed nightly, “…to be like You.”