Cheryl Husby's Prayer Mugs

“Our Lord always provides opportunities for prayer if we choose to take them.” Teresa of Avila, The Book of My Life (1562)

This morning I said special prayers for my daughter Rebecca who was having the final meeting for her graduate internship work. People all over the world said special prayers for their children today, and those prayers took as many different forms as the people who prayed them. In my particular case, I used a prayer I learned from my friend Cheryl Husby.

When Cheryl’s daughter, Elissa, went off to college, Cheryl started praying for Elissa every morning as she drank her coffee. All the hopes, dreams and fears mothers have when their children leave home were living in Cheryl’s heart, so she gave it all to the Lord. She would sit quietly in God’s presence, holding her coffee mug and repeating a seven-word prayer for Elissa: “Protect, Help, Heal, Guide, Guard, Love, Bless.”

At Christmastime that year, Cheryl told me about the prayer and how much it meant to her. I wrote down the words of the prayer because I wanted to pray that way, too. Cheryl is a potter by trade, so as the year went on she decided to make coffee mugs for others to use with the words of the prayer stamped on the mug: “Protect, Help, Heal, Guide, Guard, Love, Bless.”

Today as I prayed for Rebecca and all the people who will be with her at the meeting, I used Cheryl’s prayer mug. I drank my coffee in the presence of the Holy One, asking for those in the meeting to feel God’s light: “Protect, Help, Heal, Guide, Guard, Love, Bless.”

After prayer time, I thought of Teresa of Avila who wrote, “Our Lord always provides opportunities for prayer if we choose to take them.” When we are drinking our coffee, when we are walking to the mail box, when we are waiting in our cars at a stop light, there is an opportunity for prayer. We can ask God to protect, help, heal, guide, guard, love and bless us, our loved ones and our enemies. In the days and weeks to come, may we find ourselves more and more able to remember this truth and rely on it every moment of our lives.