Science tells us that hurricanes and cyclones will continue to get more powerful – this week we are told that the ozone friendly chemicals we turned to thinking they would protect our atmosphere are themselves harmful. Lord, help us get our responses right.
As Cyclone Amphan makes landfall (Wednesday afternoon) on the Sundabans off Bangladesh / India with an expectation that it will track across Bangladesh and India as far as Bhutan. In this supercyclone, the first in the Bay of Bengal for 20 years, people are already dying. Lord help us to remember that science is not always the answer, but only provides a way for us to begin to understand the world you have made.
With shock, we pray for the residents who have been evacuated in the state of Michigan in the United States where dams have collapsed following days of heavy rain. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency for areas near the Tittabawassee River after the Edenville and Sanford dams burst.
Even as heavy rain lashes these areas, so drought builds across parts of Europe and wildfires burn in Arizona, Florida, Britain. Lord, help us get our responses right.
Lord, hear the cries of those in regions we don’t often hear about. Local officials in Russia’s Dagestan region have described the situation there as a “catastrophe”, with reports of a rising death toll and serious shortages of equipment. Officially the region has recorded 36 deaths from the Coronavirus with more than 3,600 cases but health officials say hundreds more have died of pneumonia, including 40 medics.
We pray for the migrant workers of India, faced with walking many hundreds of miles home and dying of exhaustion on the way. Without their labor, modern India would not be built. Lord, the worker is worthy of his hire ; you hear and know the cries of the desperate. Lord, help us get our responses right.
We pray for those whose Government’s response to the Covid 19 crisis is less than compassionate; for the people of Brazil who are faced with “fake news – this is only a mild flu”; for the people of Britain and the U.S. whose governments had dismantled pandemic procedures previously in place; for the residents of Sweden’s care homes who are not being hospitalized when taken ill.
There is good news; we give thanks. On the remote Australian island, the Norfolk Island morepork owl, with an estimated population of only 45-50, has had two owl chicks survive to fledgling, the first to do so in more than a decade. White storks have hatched for the first time in over 6 centuries in England while, on world bee day, Monmouth in Wales has officially become the first ever “Bee Town”
We hear that scientists in Australia may have found a way to prevent coral bleaching – a killing event caused, in part, by ocean warming
Following the maternity ward attack on the Dasht-e-Barchi hospital in the Afghan capital Kabul, killing at least 24 people, including newborns, mothers and nurses, we give thanks for the nursing mothers who have visited the hospital to feed the orphan babies. Lord, help us get our responses right.
Lord of all and every situation we place all this, our environment, our selves in your hand, may we respond to you in love so that our responses are loving and right for your world. Let it be so. Amen
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