cancer, or a friend in financial crisis. The requests went on and on. I hate to say it, but it seemed to me that if you took the words bless and be with out of their prayer vocabulary, no one would have had anything to say. The prayers commenced in systematic fashion as we went down the list: “Bless this, bless that–be with him, be with her. . . .” And they seemed to pick up the pace as the final minutes of the allotted time ticked away. As we finished this flurry of