A Writer's Prayer: Dear God, The Only Thing I Ask of You

A writer's prayer:

Dear God,

I just wanted to take a minute out of my day to thank you for the necessities of my writerly life.

First and foremost, thanks for giving me the desire and ability to string words together to make sentences, paragraphs and stories. (They might not always make sense, but you have to start somewhere, right?)

Thank you for giving me the patience to simply observe life so I can put into words the things I see.

Thank you for allowing the thesaurus to be invented. It comes in rather handy when that one word is on the tip of my tongue, but I just can't remember what it is.

Thank you for Google. Without it, I'd spend 90 percent of my time bumping into other weary writers doing research at the library. Instead, I now bump into them on social media.

By the way, thank you for Facebook, Twitter and blogs that have allowed me to connect with so many other writers. Before the dawn of social media, I thought I was the only weird one out there who obsessed over make-believe heroes.

Thank you for the M&Ms, Twizzlers and Gummi Bears that give my mouth something to do while in the midst of a writing marathon.

Speaking of writing marathons, thanks for making caffeine available in copious amounts.

Thank you for making me the type of person who stays awake at night worrying about the lives of people who aren't even real. (Wait. Should I really be thanking you for that? Hmmm.)

Thank you for giving me an understanding family that has not yet found it necessary to have me committed for bawling over the deaths of fictional characters.

And finally, thank you for designing the human body in a manner that requires it to visit the restroom on a regular basis. If not for that, I'm pretty sure I'd have melted into this chair a long time ago.

Please keep my stories safe from plagiarists and pirates and my computer free from malware and viruses. Deliver them, instead, to those who see it fit to leave negative reviews.

And finally, watch over my characters, help me to keep them under control and please don't let me discover that they actually exist in an alternate universe. I mean, I think it would be interesting to live the life of Heather Montgomery, but I certainly wouldn't want to wake up one day and find out she's an actual person. (I kind of put her through the wringer , and I don't think she'd be very happy with me.)
 
In Jesus name, I pray. Amen.

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Kathryn Harris is a journalist, a weekend blogger, a wife, a mother of two and the author of "The Long Road to Heaven," a novel about finding faith and forgiveness in the aftermath of addiction.