Praying

I've always prayed as far back as I can remember, I've said my prayers. As I got older I stopped praying every night like I did as a child, and sometimes I would go for I don't know how long without praying. Once I started going to my current church, I started praying again. While I was pregnant with Maddie, I prayed a lot. And since Maddie died I've been praying a lot more. This cycle I started meditating along with prayer. It helps to just shut the world out and try to focus on God and me. The other day one of my online buddies told me about a saint she had run across in conversation with 2 totally different people.

St. Gerard, the patron saint of motherhood.

Saint Gerard Majella, the "Patron Saint of Motherhood," was born in 1726 in a small town in the south of Italy called Muro. Gerard was devoted to his widowed mother and he also devoted his life to God and helping others. His selfless help to others in various circumstances endeared him to all sorts of people. He entered the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer in 1749 and became a lay brother. He was a model of obedience and possessed extraordinary wisdom. He spent his life dedicated to helping the needy and the poor, being poor himself and having an understanding of the sorrows of the needy. He often gave away his earnings and his own food to the poor and those that came to him never left empty-handed. Sometimes how the food or money came to be there was known only to God and to Gerard. He was also known to have mystical abilities such as powers of prophecy, healing, bilocations, the reading of consciences, and so forth. He even predicted the day and hour of his own death. During his short life he helped many and performed many miracles. It seems that God had given him, in particular, the special power to help mothers in need. In life and since his death, he has helped so many women who have prayed to him during labor that he earned the nickname the "Saint of Happy Deliveries." Many mothers from all over the world have even named their child Gerard after him in gratitude, and have adopted him as their patron in the joys and fears of childbirth.

Saint Gerard had a short stay here on earth dying in 1755 at the age of twenty-nine from tuberculosis, but he left a legacy of hope and faith to God that keeps spreading by word of mouth from those familiar with his life story and by those just discovering his miracles.

So now I've added a nightly prayer to St. Gerard as I lay in bed before I go to sleep. Some may find it odd since I'm not catholic, but it's not like I'm sacrificing small animals or something I'm praying and there's nothing wrong with that.