Dear God, thank you for this opportunity to be together tonight and to bring people together with our music. Thank you for surrounding us with each other. You really gave us an awesome guitarist, God. We appreciate you taking the time to do that back in 1983, when you had so much stuff on your desk. I remember that the musical Annie was closing on Broadway that year; it was in basically every single newspaper in the city every day, it seemed like. And I remember thinking that maybe the only prayers about arts and entertainment that you would be listening to would be that cast’s prayer circles before they went on each night, but you tuned them out and instead focused on steering this man named Richie Sambora toward me here on Earth because you knew it was more important that I get a rippin’ guitar player early on so I could form this band and we could start making our way to the top. The U.S. Embassy in Beirut was bombed that year, too, so I know you had tons of stuff going on and were really busy, so I’m just sayin’ I appreciate your making kick-ass lead guitar a priority in ‘83. You didn’t have to do that, but you did. And you didn’t stop there—you focused on filling out my lineup with a bassist, a drummer, and a keyboardist, and even went further by re-answering my prayers and sending another bassist to get us through the departure of our original bassist, and I appreciate that as well. As I’ve told you in prior preshow prayer circles, he was fired because his playing became unsatisfactory in live situations after we got famous. That’s all I’m going to say about that, as I think you know what the real story is there and you have the power to guide him through it. As a reminder, though, I need you to bump that down on your list while we’re out here on the road; he’s gone, but we’re still out here rockin’, and I’m going to have to ask that you make these shows the priority. One hundred million albums sold worldwide, my friend, so I’d like to think I haven’t let you down in that regard.

Give us the strength to deliver to the fans out there in the seats tonight. I know there’s a lot of stuff going wrong in the world again. Guess what, though: there’s always going to be stuff going wrong in the world. I need you focused on the Bon Jovi show at the Wachovia Center in Philadephia, Pennsylvania, USA, Earth. I need you focused on our set list, and I need you focused on making sure the couple of hiccups we had in sound check today don’t become issues onstage tonight. Again, I know the stuff’s really hitting the fan down here and you’re probably getting slammed with more prayers than ever, but for the next 75 nights we’ve got shows and I’m asking you to put tuning in to our preshow prayer circle at the top of your list. That’s why we’re doubling up our power and signal by being in a circle like this and by holding hands to basically make one giant person beaming one huge consolidated prayer up to you—we’ll do what we have to do to get heard and to cut through the clutter of individual prayers.

OK, let’s see … thanked you for bringing us together, asked you for the strength to do a good show, went over the sound-check situation and asked you to be on that once we hit the stage here in a minute. What else … ummmm … oh! There are some weird things happening with merch sales in some of these venues. I won’t go into it now, but will just kind of give you a topline view of the situation: For the most part, the stadiums we’re playing are all owned by the same corporation, and the revenue split we agreed to on merchandise sales was supposed to be for the entire tour, but in some markets they’re now saying they’ll need to take an extra 5 percent because of “additional financial burdens in the particular venue or market,” which seems weird to me. I can tell you there’s no addendum to the agreement management signed, so it seems fishy to me that they could just change this on the fly when we pull into town. So, if you could give us the strength tonight, once we hit the stage, to just realize that the merch sales are out of our hands, that would be great. That kind of falls under giving us the strength to deliver a great show to these fans, I guess, but I wanted to take a minute to bring up this particular wrinkle in logistics, just to have it on your radar in case you see an opportunity to iron that out with the venue, for you are …

The power, the kingdom, and the glory …

Amen.