When I was a Navy Corpsman, I took care of several people who died.

One was another corpsman who developed cancer that spread all over his body.

The Navy shipped him to our hospital in the Oakland/San Francisco Bay area, so that he could be near his family when he died.

I took care of another man who was an old timer in the Navy, and he died because of too much alcohol over the long haul-his liver gave out.

I was with him when he died. I was also with another man who had a heart attack, and we could not revive him. I've seen death; I've seen people die.

In my undergraduate work in college I took a class on death and dying. It was taught by a professor who had had a heart attack.

Because he had had a brush with death, and because that had changed the way he chose to live what life he had left, he realised this was a significant subject of study for psychologists.

The class was the most popular class in the whole psychology department.

There have been numerous deaths on the Island lately. If people are not shooting one another, then people are dying on the road.

On top of that people are dying from disease or age. Given that, I think it's important to consider one's limited span on earth and to live as if each day might be one's last.

That is such a cliché thing to say, but it's the truth.

The sense that one might be close to death also brings people to respond in various ways.

In an article appearing last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Matthew Vess and his colleagues stated that the human capacity to reflect on the inevitability of physical annihilation conflicts with a biologically rooted inclination to prolong existence and this conflict arouses potentially debilitating feelings of anxiety.

To avert this anxiety, humans place faith in culturally constructed and shared conceptions of reality (i.e., worldviews) that explain the origins of existence, provide guidelines for living a meaningful life, and offer the potential to transcend physical death via literal (e.g., religious conceptions of an afterlife) or symbolic (e.g., building a legacy through cultural achievements that will remain after death) immortality….

Their article examined religious remedies in dealing with potentially life threatening health care issues, and it further indicated that individuals invested in fundamental religious beliefs perceive prayer to be a more effective treatment against physical illness when mortality concerns are heightened.

When I read that research, I found myself shaking my head, thinking, "Here goes another case of someone peering into something they don't know for themselves and trying to make sense of it anyway".

I realised the concern of the researchers; they wanted to know what might bring parents to resort to prayer instead of sound medical advice when children who depended on them are mortally ill. It's a legitimate concern.

Regardless, what does a person who does not know God understand about a way of life so influenced by the quality of a relationship with God?

Take prayer, for instance. Now, I know that there are several kinds of prayer; let's just take three: thanksgiving, petition, and intercession.

In thanksgiving you express gratitude for something God has already done. In petition you ask for God to do something in regard to yourself, and in intercession you ask God to do something in regard to someone else.

There are all kinds of rituals that sometimes accompany prayer; people can fast, people can thank God for something that hasn't yet happened (thinking to make their petition more sure by talking about it as if it had already been accomplished), people can shout out loud, or repeat themselves over and over.

People often attempt to make deals with God when they pray, committing themselves to some kind of giving in exchange for what they want.

To me, though, prayer is simply talking with God, the Being you supposedly know intimately, and Who knows you more than you can understand, and telling truthfully what is on your heart.

Now, when a person does that, then that person is brought close to God, and God often answers not so much with some kind of earthshaking turn of events as much as He does with the sense of His presence.

I have often, for instance, been asking God for guidance about which thing I should do, which way to go in life, or I have been telling Him about my needs and asking him to supply, only to get no clear answer.

Rather, what I have often gotten is a renewed sense of the beauty of God's creation, the light that seems more radiant, and the peace, the contentment with being alive and who I am in Christ.

The subtext under that picture reads, 'Everything is OK'.

This was not tapped by the study of religious alternatives to medicine. This cannot be understood by people who have not experienced it; it is what the Bible calls the peace that passes all understanding.

Often religious people just need to consult God before they can give themselves, in peace, to whatever confronts them, whether that be the need for medical intervention or the need to sit still and wait on God.

So, yes, I pray for the situation on this island, because I am troubled by the threat of gun violence. Our house has been broken into twice, and I've confronted a third, would-be burglar as he was attempting to get in. It's no fun feeling so vulnerable to those who would be about such mischief.

I also know death; I have lost people dear to me. I don't fear dying myself, but I want to live as long as I can for the sake of my loved ones and for the sake of achieving my purpose in life.

I pray that my prayers may be effective on behalf of myself, others specifically, and others on this Island more generally. How about you?