Meghan Good’s reflections on the prayer of welcome by Thomas Keating (“Welcome God on the road of suffering,” Oct. 29) were meaningful to me. I’d been introduced to the prayer before but found it hard to welcome everything that came. A global pandemic gives plenty of opportunity for learning how to “consent to the presence and work of God in the suffering I cannot (faithfully) avoid,” as Good says.

Her column resonates with the things I’m learning about mindfulness — about not pushing away what is hard but examining it for what it offers to understand myself and the world. Praying the welcoming prayer has begun a shift away from blame or shame to offering my authentic emotions to God. I find myself learning from them in unexpected ways.

I hope to learn to live into this paragraph at the end of Good’s column: “I am suddenly, strangely unafraid of evil and its games, of life and its random cruelties. I welcome everything that comes to me. Not because it is good but because God is good. And the goodness of God has claimed the right to finish every story.”

Bev Regier, Newton, Kan.