God Squad: Bedtime prayers edited by readers, mom and God

I have asked you, dear readers, to share with me the bedtime prayers taught to you by your parents, and again you have filled my inbox with joy, piety and love.

Bedtime prayers are deeply important because they keep God in our daily spiritual agenda as children, making it easy for us to connect to God every day when we become “all growed up.” The best definition of the overused and underappreciated word “spirituality” I ever heard was “life lived in the presence of God.”

The best-known and most common bedtime prayer is, of course, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

When I wrote about that prayer in my previous column, I expressed my concerns about the phrase “If I should die before I wake.” Frankly, it seemed to me to be more than a little terrifying as a bedtime thought for children who might already be afraid of things living under the bed. I was right. Many of you wrote back to me with edited versions of the prayer that left out the "if I die" line. Here are some alternatives,

My husband and I are retired dairy farmers. With farm prices, we often said it would take a miracle if we could pay all the bills, so we called our farm Miracle Acres.