Years ago, I got migraines. Not often, usually just for a day. They taught me that migraines are awful for those who live with them all the time. (My mom argued that hers stopped when my dad had a stroke. She was freed to care for him. I had no argument for that.)

What I remember about those days was that I became unable to think. I ended up in these little, struggling thought loops. Not the way we worry in the middle of the night, not those loops. But more like trying to align the lyrics and rhythm of a song we heard just before our thinking went off track. “Tall guy, beard, twins, purple hoser.” It’s the way Dude Perfect describe themselves in a theme song. I couldn’t make it fit last week. While coughing, and sleeping, and tossing, I could not make it fit.

The fact that you don’t know Dude Perfect, and that the theme doesn’t matter is, exactly, the point. In those moments, our thinking is adrift. And we know that we’re sick.

It wasn’t a migraine last week, but that day, I knew I was sick. Eventually, I mostly gave up on Dude Perfect. I turned to the prayer I’ve been turning to for the last four years. Every night.

“Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who watch, or work, or weep tonight, and give your angels charge with those who sleep.” I’ve written about it before. For me, for our family, last week, I kept coming back to “sooth the suffering.”

Too often, we think prayer has to be original. Sometimes, we need to join in with the prayer that is already, always, everywhere, going on.

So I laughed, in quiet delight, when a friend sent a prayer to me today. Which started, “Keep watch dear Lord over Jon.  Whether he works, watches or weeps this night.”

The words I’d been joining while I couldn’t think, are the words offered late at night, by parts of the body for each other.