Twice in the last week friends have asked me to pray for someone they love. It was not a fill-in-the-awkward-silence kind of comment either. They meant it. I feel honored.

I have prayed. Repeatedly. For both of them, with a visualization of them each being surrounded in a bubble of comfort. I close my eyes and picture them as the center of gravity, pulling in my love, their own mother's devotion, and the affection of the person who invited me into this circle of prayer. 

In both cases I had to clear away preconceptions that their life is already idyllic. The thought poked like a bramble, and I tore it back. Pray for them. 

Prayer is a sweet deal. You get to make a wish for someone and it's not even your birthday. It is like those secret panels in old houses where you start in the library and in a trice end up in the billiard room. I sit with my eyes closed, on an old blue couch in Pennsylvania, and instantly I am hovering above a young couple miles away whose life is rumbling along fault lines that never shifted before. I stood on those particular cliffs myself, and I remember the anxiety. It clutches like a vice on your heart. I felt very alone, even though I wasn't. It did not occur to me then, but maybe, maybe someone was praying for me. I survived, after all, through the earthquake that broke me open. 

This week I witnessed a young woman speaking bravely about mental illness, and her own struggles. She cried as she talked. I cried as I listened. Now she can be the sweet spot of my own prayers, as she walks bravely into her efforts to beat back the fear. 

I cannot take any of these people back in time to where they were before the struggle. But I can hold a portion of their Somedays... a placeholder of when it will be them sitting silently, mindfully, head bowed in prayer.