A phone call from a friend last night and her telling me of how she prays every day for each member of my family reminded me of how grateful I am for the living and breathing community of saints, but it also humbled me because it reminded me of how I am so easily distracted in prayer and fail to pray about what I intend to pray about.

“I throw myself down in my chamber and call in and invite God and His angels thither, and when they are there I neglect God and His angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door. I talk in the same posture of praying, eyes lifted up, knees bowed down, as though I prayed to God, and if God or angels should ask me when I thought last of God in that prayer I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it I cannot tell. A memory of yesterday’s pleasures, a fear of tomorrow’s dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain troubles me in my prayer.”
--John Donne