Today is the day!
Well, here I am finally, in November 2020, at the long-anticipated launch of this book. I say this because the journey began 14 years ago, with a simple desire to express my gratitude daily, consistently, and with meaning. I’d struggled to give thanks spontaneously out of sheer awkwardness and had resorted to the Internet to find a short, sweet way to talk to God. I began with a one-paragraph template that I’d like to share but could not resist altering within hours of its discovery. As a true Libra, it's my nature to embellish.
And so, at first, I began to discern the things I wanted to bring to God's attention. Leaning on, as if a crutch, the person who wrote that original paragraph, I was able to loosen my inhibition with the Divine. As the words began to flow, my small prayer began to grow.
The paragraph became a page, progressed to five pages, and went on from there. My dialogue with God became personal. I asked for correction of my character flaws and the addition of positive character traits! These changes meant finding out precisely what those flaws were, and I set out to discover and correct them.
I began by writing prayers inspired by a Chinese proverb, "If There is Light in the Soul," which ends with, “...there will be peace in the world”. I wrote to improve within myself such qualities as forgiveness, acceptance, relationships, gratitude, and letting go of hurts. The prayers that resulted from my efforts reflected spiritual growth, personal healing, and freedom from unhealthy attitudes.
I soon began to feel tugs of inspiration. These came to me as urges to watch television in mid-afternoon, which I had never done before. Some of these nudges led to PBS or CNN specials on the environment, showing me global issues that severely threatened our planet and its creatures. Inspiration led me to begin note-taking on these documentaries, which would later form the basis of my prayers.
Poaching and eradicating species, widespread hunger and starvation, unsustainable deforestation, a worldwide shortage of potable water, the need for corporate agrarian reform, and other global needs were unfolding before me. I began writing prayers to talk with God about multiple seemingly irreparable situations.
Other documentaries and news programs focused on the lack of social justice in the U.S. and abroad, showing how it manifests in different forms in other countries. The violent restrictions on social freedoms in Hong Kong, and human rights violations in China, Russia, Syria, and Belarus, were brutal for me to watch and comprehend, being accustomed, as I am, to an American, democratic form of government. It would take raising our world consciousness for conditions to change.
Anderson Cooper's 2007 CNN documentary, Planet in Peril, inspired me to write my first prayer, entitled Prayer for Our Planet. It provided me with a way to address our planet’s need for environmental change with the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. Where else could I find help with dilemmas that had such global reach? I knew I’d reached the ultimate Source of support, and thus, I began the book as a personal prayer-time between God and me, on behalf of our planet.
I have always known that God inspired me to write this book through the intervention of His Holy Spirit. Help with publishing it came in the form of a novel coronavirus pandemic that suspended all operations on Earth. The sequestration this afforded me became a blessing and allowed me the focus to publish Prayer Book for Our Planet: Solutions for Social Justice and Environmental Change. I had needed a time of freedom from all distractions, and the SARS-Co-V-2 virus provided it.
Inspirational communications had been popping up around me for months in various forms. There were messages on eye-catching wooden or ceramic plaques, like "Make it Happen,” "You Got This,” "It's Time,” "And the Story Begins,” "Evolve,” "Think,” "Write,” and "I Can and I Will,” everywhere I shopped. These signs always appeared out of place in their respective environments and were impossible to ignore. I began collecting them, and they surround and inspire me as I write this blog. At last, a multi-colored, battery-operated NEON sign appeared, saying, "Get It Done”! And so I did!
It’s been a rigorous, circuitous ride, and now I place all outcomes in God's hands; I do this with 100% trust. And, as for this current, anciently-awaited book launch, one couldn't otherwise know the relief and comfort that this type of milestone provides. It's an enormous relief, a release from the tension of anticipation, not to mention the reduction of elevated cortisol levels. I recently read that 1% of people who write books publish them. Despite the many efforts involved in the process, I am still surprised by the statistic.
The secret to my tenacity lies in a message I received one evening, many years ago, while I sat at a red light in the middle of the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. I noticed a giant white billboard towering over the opposite side of the street on my left. It was brightly lit and showed two boxers standing in a ring. They wore colored trunks against the all-white backdrop. Underneath them, in black, a simple declarative statement, "Determination always beats fatigue in the final kick."
The simplicity and magnitude of that message spoke volumes to me long before I conceived of writing this book. Its wisdom has stayed with me, pushing me forward throughout my life, ever since I hastily scribbled it on a piece of scrap before the red light turned green.