Loving God,
We know you as a trusted source of direction and purpose. Sometimes we think our thoughts are your thoughts. Sometimes we pray that they are.
But today we pray for the sensory awareness of how you feel. We hope that it will guide us and how we feel about refugees who have experienced the recent Cyclone Idai in Mozambique. Malawai, and Zimbabwe. Whatever would it be like to try to carry everything precious, for skin to protest rough surfaces, for skin to give up, blister, and tear. Whatever would it be like to smell the gradually and then rapidly decomposing bodies of those who did not survive, to hear the cries of those who mourn, to see the struggles of those attempting to find a place of safety, a place of comfort with friends? We pray not just for the strength to be aware in our senses but also for the conviction and creativity it will take for the victims and from us who are not this time victimized
We pray for the insight to respect the loss of generations of family farms in the flooding in the American Midwest. There is deep meaning in a farm that was cultivated by your parents and your grandparents and your great-grandparents and more. Grant us, we pray, vision to see beyond what help can be given by the so-called “social safety net”. Show us more, larger ways to care for them and for all of us.
Open our senses, our minds, our hearts to include the whole world. We need to admit the shame and the pain of the massacre in New Zealand. We do not need to wordsmith and dillydally with how to improve the situation that allowed that catastrophe. You have never asked us, and we should not ask ourselves, only for perfect solutions. You ask for better ones, and so we give thanks for the rapid and compassionate actions of the government of New Zealand banning semi-automatic and assault weapons. As airplanes crash and killers destroy, we try to make every effort to protect our own. Let us not shrink from the truth that we should do better than that. We pray for the courage to do better than that.
God in your glory, raise us up to be the people you need doing the work that needs to be done. Amen
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