1 Dear God,
2 Thank you for this day
3 Thank you for the food we ate
4 Please watch over our house and protect us while we sleep
5 Please keep us healthy
6 Help us to learn more and more about you
7 Thanks that I had a good day today
8 Help me to have a good day tomorrow
9 Help me not to have any nightmares, just dreams
10 Help our house not to get struck by lightning
11 Help our house not to catch on fire
12 Help our neighbors' houses not to catch on fire and the fire jump over to our house
13 Help someone not to on purpose drop a match on our house
14 Help someone not accidentally drop a match on our house
...
XX Amen.
This was the prayer that I said--either aloud or to myself--nightly before I went to sleep for many of the formative years of my life, probably up until I was eleven or twelve years old. I said each line in that precise order, and I never omitted any lines. (The "..." refers to additional lines that I said but cannot remember anymore.)
This prayer initially came into existence once my parents started sharing the prayer-before-bedtime responsibility with me when I was probably five or six years old. I borrowed lines from the prayers that my dad used to say with me after tucking me in and from the prayers I overheard my older brother say with my dad as he was tucked in. Lines 3, 7, and 8 came from my older brother's prayers, and Lines 2 and 4-6 came from my dad's prayers with me.
For a few years, my prayers consisted only of Lines 1-8 and XX, but as I grew older, I became more fearful that bad things would happen unless I specifically asked God to prevent them from happening. So I began adding original content to my prayer, starting with Line 9. When I would pray aloud with one of my parents, though, I would say Line 9 to myself and leave them in silence for a couple seconds before I closed with, "Amen". I was embarrassed by Line 9 and didn't want my parents to hear it.
One of the things I was most afraid of as a child was a house fire. I don't know
where this fear came from. Perhaps it was stoked when one of my
kindergarten classmates came to school sobbing one day, telling the
class in tears, "My house burned down." I saw firsthand the chaos and emotional damage that house fires caused. Or perhaps this fear became a permanent
fixture of my childhood anxiety repertoire after the incident when my
younger brother left an electric charcoal fire starter plugged into an
indoor socket while we dropped my older brother off at a friend's house
and returned to a house full of smoke. I had never seen my mom so
hysterical before as she called the fire department. (The resultant damage was minor and was contained to the interior of the living room, as we had only been gone a few minutes.)
When I was in elementary school, I was also terrified of thunderstorms, and lightning in particular due to its connection with fire. Imagery from films of lightning strikes causing fires pervaded my mind (e.g., The Lion King). Because my fear of lightning causing a house fire was so great, I added Line 10 to my prayers.
Later, I realized that Line 10 only covered a small subset of causes of fire. I feared that God would "catch me", and he could allow our house to catch on fire by some other means. "Well, you didn't ask me not to let a gas main explode," would be an example of a line I imagined God might retort with had I gotten a chance to confront him about why he let our house catch on fire. To mitigate this fear, I added Line 11, which was intended to cover causes of fire originating from within our house.
It wasn't long before I remembered our house could still catch on fire from external causes. Enter Lines 12, 13, and 14. Whenever I said Lines 13 and 14, I imagined one of the villains from Hanna-Barbera's The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible "Noah's Ark" seen below as the perpetrator. I imagined him standing on our porch and walking up to our front door with a lit match in his hand, either holding the match up against the house (Line 13) or turning around and dropping the match from his hand onto our porch (Line 14; hardly an accident in this visualization).
Thus, over the years, my nightly prayer grew lengthier as I accumulated more and more things I needed to ask about to protect myself. All of the original content I added to my prayer--Lines 9 and beyond--consisted entirely of negative requests, in which I asked God for something not to happen as opposed to asking for something. I was afraid that if I did not utter the words, then I would have left myself vulnerable, and the bad thing could have happened. Thus, I had to be sure that I always made every single request in my list.
Looking back, I see that this practice almost perfectly fits the definition of obsessive-compulsive behavior. My mind was full of intrusive, unwanted fears around the possibility of all these negative things happening to me, and I responded to these obsessions by performing a repetitive, ritualistic routine that had to be precisely followed in order to assuage my obsessions...at least until the next night. By then, my prayers would have "worn off" and would no longer apply. I needed to refresh my requests on a nightly basis, as a kind of insurance that horrifying events would not happen to me during that night.
Prayer is hardly a soothing activity if you conduct it from a headspace of perceived risk mitigation--if you're trying to preempt all the ways that God could find a loophole in your requests to allow something bad to happen to you. I feared falling asleep without praying, or falling asleep without completing my nightly list of requests.
So, one night, during a family visit to my grandparents' house when I was probably nine or ten years old, I went to bed so exhausted that I devised a shortcut so I could get to sleep faster: "Dear God, please just say my regular prayer for me." It felt risky to make that ask--would God not honor the requests contained within my regular prayer if I didn't explicitly verbalize them?
But I woke up the next morning, and everything was fine. I realized I didn't necessarily have to say all the words in order for them to come true. Consequently, that shortcut became a technique that I used with increasing frequency when I went to bed and wanted to fall asleep quickly.
