The prayer I neither sought nor expected

Roy Nageak said a prayer for me tonight. That was not why I stopped by to see him. I did not seek a prayer. The thought to seek a prayer would never have occurred to me. I just dropped in to see him and Flossie because whenever I show up at their house they always make me feel at home, I knew my good friend Chie would want to see a picture of them and I wanted to hear whatever stories and history they might relate to me. So I stopped in, they fed me, and then Roy told me some good history from up here and down into the Brooks Range mountains.

I had another commitment and all too soon it was time to leave. I told them I expected to come back in late February, assuming that the surgery I was supposed to get months ago but now absolutely must have no later than early January actually happens and I recover in the three-week time period the doctor says I will. Roy offered to say a prayer for me, so I agreed. He then stood beside me, put his strong arm around me, and he said a prayer for me, one filled with great warmth and love.

I am not a religious man, but there was something special in Roy's prayer, something I felt all the way through my body and into my soul. It felt good. I left feeling all would go well and that as big and physically challenging as is the multi-year task that lies before me here in the Arctic, I will ultimately succeed.

The little one with Roy and Flossie is their grandson Ruben Roy, named both for his father and his grandfather. Dr. Chie Sakabara, originally of Japan, now a young wife and new mother, professor at the University of Oklahoma, adopted by Barrow and the North Slope and by Roy and Flossie Nageak as their daughter - this snapshot is for you.

As I read about light, Jim transports me down to the river to pray

Jimmy is a natural born hacker. He does some really strange things with my computer. Earlier today, he stepped across my keyboard and suddenly my computer began to speak out loud – really loud. It read everything that was on my screen to me. If I changed webpages, then it read everything on the new webpage. If I went to my email, it read the emails aloud. If I switched to Photoshop, then it read "Photoshop"and the title names of any pictures I pulled up. If I pulled up a word document, it read the words. I could not figure out how he did it, nor how I could stop it. It was driving me crazy!

Finally, I opened my activity monitor, found something called "voiceover", figured that must be it, and put a stop to it.

Then, a little bit ago, I was reading the transcript of a conversation on Burn Magazine between master photographer David Alan Harvey and David Hobby, a master of artificial lighting. To enhance my reading experience, Jim positioned himself in his usual place between my keyboard and monitor. This time, he was very careful not to step on the keyboard at all. Yet, suddenly, Alison Krauss began to sing at me out of my computer, "as I went down to the river to pray…" Jim does this every now and then. Somehow, and I have no idea how, he opens up iTunes and plays that song. Never any other song. Just that song. When the song reached it's end, my computer fell silent.

It is almost like Jim is sending me a message - that I need to go down to the river to pray. Early tomorrow morning, I catch a plane to Barrow. Over two days, I will attend two funerals. I pray for my friends who have died; I pray for their families who have been so good to me. I am not a religious man, but I pray for them. Prayer is not the sole domain of the religious.