Growing up in a family that was big on prayer and faith, I wasn’t a stranger to the practices and devotions of a catholic family. I had heard of Psalm 91 being spoken of by various preachers and friends as a sure shot “prayer for protection.” For some reason I wasn’t one of those who would pray the psalm regularly or even occasionally, but all that changed when I moved from my hometown in coastal Kerala to the city of Madras about 29 years ago. I was staying with my sister and family and I noticed my dear brother-in-law, (who sadly is no more) praying this every morning before stepping out of the house. Now he wasn’t one of those “holy and pious” persons, or one of those meek persons who needed any protection at all, but seeing him pray the psalm without fail and that too from memory evoked an interest in me and I started to pray or rather read the same every morning. Well I couldn’t memorize the psalm initially because the bibles that I had picked up had some very classical or rather traditional language that somehow went over my head. Eventually I came upon the “Good News” version bible that had a rather easier translation which I was able to memorize and so Psalm 91 became my daily staple as well. It is now a standard practice in our home to pray Psalm 91 everyday, before every journey and whenever we feel the need for some divine protection. It’s ingrained in our family so deeply that my younger son, even before learning to read started mouthing the Psalm phonetically. I suppose one could say that it was a prayer being mouthed monotonously as a habit and also at times when we felt real danger like some bad turbulence on an aircraft, some bad cyclones and floods in Chennai (you can see it’s changed from Madras earlier) and also some other situations…. In my next blog I will write about how all of this changed one evening on the Rama 9 suspension bridge over the River Chao Praya in Bangkok Thailand….