Adena M'lynn's Voice

Inspired by Ecclesiastes 3 and Seasons of Life 1973–Sunday School St.Stephen UMC, Mesquite, Texas   My first prayer was the one everybody knows, “Now I lay me down to sleep…” I said it so many times I could probably say it backwards in my sleep. The second prayer I learned was about food— “God is great, God is good…” We’d fold our hands at the table and race through the words before the food got cold. Then came the big one, the prayer Jesus taught us Himself. The Lord’s Prayer. That one feels different, like it carries the weight of the whole church inside it. It’s not just words you repeat, it’s a prayer that feels like it keeps on praying long after you’ve finished. But there’s one prayer I can’t forget. Not because someone else gave it to me, but because I wrote it myself. It was in Sunday School, the teacher told us to take a scripture and use it to make our own prayer. Most kids went for short verses. I picked a looong one, Ecclesiastes chapter 3— the one about seasons “To eve...

Lord, I thought my grief was quiet— tucked away, laid to rest beneath the years. But when I see another heart break, when I hear the sobs of someone left behind, my sorrow stirs, like a child waking in the night. Their loss is not mine, and yet it is— because grief speaks one language, and my soul remembers every word. So I bow my head. I hold their pain as if it were my own. I carry both ours to You, the One who knows every tear by name. Borrowed sorrows, not to crush us, but to bind us together— reminders that love does not die, it only aches until You mend it whole. Lord, teach us to share the weight, to whisper prayers for one another, to find comfort not in forgetting, but in knowing You are near to the brokenhearted. In the name of Jesus, my Comforter and Savior,  Amen.

by Adena M’lynn There are days when words fold in on themselves— like paper cranes in a storm. When grief grows too heavy for syllables to lift, and the mouth becomes a tomb of unfinished prayers. I’ve tried to name the ache, to pull it out like a splinter of meaning lodged beneath the skin of memory— but it refuses to come clean. Instead, it hums behind my ribs, a silent hymn I can’t translate. Some things don’t have letters. Some pain doesn’t rhyme. Sometimes you open your mouth and what comes out isn’t language— it’s breath, or sob,  or scream, or silence so loud it swallows the room. I’ve written poems that bled through pages, each line a bandage on something I couldn’t explain. I’ve spoken truth in metaphors because the real words were too raw,  too real. And still— it wasn’t enough. Because how do you write the sound of your heart breaking in a language that requires grammar? How do you paint the color of despair without making it beautiful? Some pain refuses to be roman...