South Korea

World News This Week in Prayer – Thursday, May 14, 2020

Dear God,

We take so much for granted. We want things to go a certain way, our way: Forgive us our narrow-mindedness. Help us to see beyond our small spot on the planet, beyond our place in this moment of time. Move us out of our heads and into our hearts. Shake us loose from what we cling to that is false. Help us to ask, “Does this nourish?” “Do I really need this?” “Is it your will?” Transform our understanding. Make us instruments of your peace.

In this time of sheltering in place, we understand even more the sacredness of gathering, our need to gather – to share the joy of birth, and to be close and give comfort when laying someone to rest. We are horrified at the disrespect and senseless acts that have occurred in Afghanistan. We mourn the attack on the maternity ward at Doctors Without Borders’ Dasht-e-Barchi Hospital in Kabul, where two newborns and 11 others were killed. We grieve for the 24 people killed and 68 injured during an explosion at a funeral in Jalalabad province. We pray for the injured, the terrorized evacuees and witnesses, and the frontline personnel and families. We lay our hearts before you in a moment of silence… Lord, have mercy.

Protect the hospitals, public health workers, and humanitarian organizations that work with so little and do so much, especially in this Covid-19 pandemic. Amplify their efforts. Cause our leaders to awaken to right and swift action at the incredible loss of health care workers around the world to the virus. May they be moved to action by photos such as the one taken by Eraldo Peres on May 12, International Nurses Day, in Brasilia, Brazil. That photo, distributed by the Associated Press, pictures nurses at dusk protesting the deaths of their colleagues by lying down, arms outstretched on the earth, each holding a paper with the name of a colleague and a candle resting on their chest. Lord, in your compassion, strengthen us to do good and speak out at injustice.

Help us to hear your call in the cries of all your people. Help us to listen for your call in those who can hardly speak and who suffer silently.

Comfort the many who are isolated at home, quarantined in ICU’s, and families who do not get to say “good bye,” “I love you” one last time.
Sustain those who are depressed and soothe those who are so very anxious.

Oh God, you embrace all regret and deep remorse. You have room for everyone. What a mighty comfort. Help us likewise to show mercy and tender kindnesses, as we sort out loss upon loss around the world.

We groan at the wanton criminal neglect and malpractice of a South Korean multinational chemical factory and the layers of Indian board, state and central environmental authorities that led to the deaths of 12, including two children, and the poisoning over 1,000 as polystyrene gas entered the streets and homes of Visakhapatnam, India. We are reminded of the Bhopal, India, methyl isocyanate gas industrial disaster in 1984 at an insecticide plant that killed over 15,000, and pray for the contamination that still exists more than 35 years later, continuing to cause anguish, birth defects, and mental retardation.

We are angered at the easing of U.S. environmental laws to allow industrial pollution that steals air and water; snuffs out lives; and kills and destroys habitat. Help us to shine light on these grievous imbalances of power. Lay bare the acts of greed and corruption. Shed your light on the false values of expediency for the sake of profit. We offer again a moment of silence… Lord, have mercy. Give us purpose and clarity, as we regain a sense of urgency for the stewardship of our planet your creation.

We turn in gratitude for so many caring people and organizations, like the Washington Potato Growers Association (U.S.), which gave away over a million pounds of potatoes this week. Help us to understand generosity as a powerful and beautiful act, an act that acknowledges the other, the food insecure, the hungry, and those choosing between rent and groceries. As countries around the world take the risk of reopening businesses and other non-essential operations after Covid-19 shut-downs and stay-at-home orders, support the small business owners, the workers who are at risk, and the still unemployed. Give us patience and unity of purpose.

Help us in these turbulent times to understand the stability of our faith, hope and love: Faith with action, hope in the knowledge of your enduring love, and love itself that has conquered sin and death.

May we live inside the words of Paul in his letter to the Romans 8:37-39. “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Amen.

World News This Week in Prayer – January 2, 2020

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.
James 1:17

Oh Lord, there are many things that concern us and call us to prayer.

We open our hearts to you in gratitude and wonder.

We pray for those who rage and are quick to anger, for those who seem to be eaten up by intolerance. We pray for those who express their contempt and fury in violence to themselves and others. We grieve at those who have lost their lives to aggression due to fighting, war, criminal violence, and terrorism. We call out the names of nations so rife with conflict, so often in the news — Afghanistan, Mexico, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, South Sudan, India, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Central African Republic, Pakistan, and the Philippines. We call out the nations that make the weapons of war that fuel decades-long conflict and destruction: US, Russia, France, Germany, Spain, South Korea, China, the United Kingdom, Israel, Italy, and the Netherlands and many more. Help us to see beyond the headlines to stand up for the women and children, the families, the victims, those starving and displaced. We call out for your mercy. Safeguard the journalists who bring the news, relate the stories of the imprisoned, the refugee, those made invisible by war, bigotry, and hatred. Safeguard the whistleblowers. Sustain us as we examine our own hearts, shed our own contempt and learn the practice of peacemaking in our homes and communities.

This season can be a time of anxiety as well as anticipation. We can sense tension and disharmony instead of peace. Many feel depression and despair instead of wellbeing and belonging. Help us to understand and accept those who suffer in mind, body, and spirit. They may be close or far away. Help us to learn compassion and to practice generosity, consideration, kindness and mutual regard. We pray for those who are without homes, who are estranged from their families who feel alone and isolated. May we grow in our practice of charity and give beyond counting. Guide each of us to do the right thing in our own special way for the need is great.

As the past year turns into this new decade in the tumultuous millennium help us to shed despair and the sense of heaviness that the need is unending and insurmountable. Sustain us with the words of healing. May we be reminded that around the world literacy is increasing, childhood deaths are declining and people are being lifted out of deep poverty as never before known.

May the hope born in Advent light the way through the minutes, hours, days and months to come.

May your love-come-down-among-us strengthen and steady our steps, telling us that we are not alone.

Amen.

World News This Week in Prayer – Thurs., October 17, 2019

Be gentle with us, O Lover of Souls.
Be gentle with us, for surely in this fractured and fracturing world,
that above all is what we need:
To (re)learn to be gentle with ourselves.
To be gentle with each other.
To be gentle with our planet.

Be gentle with those – especially with those – who don’t seem to have a gentle bone in their bodies.
Be gentle with the United States, for abandoning their Kurdish allies; with the Turkish forces attacking the Kurds; with the country of Syria in the middle.
Be gentle with the owners of the Bangladesh clothing factory under investigation for abusing their workers.
Be gentle with the leaders of Venezuela, which just won a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council, despite their country’s own horrendous human rights violations.

Be gentle with those whom we cannot forgive.
Be gentle with the South Korean mastermind of the massive “dark web” child pornography marketplace who was arrested this week, along with 337 users of the site from 11 countries.
Be gentle with all who bully and abuse and terrorize, in the schoolyards, in our homes, in our workplaces, in our world.

Gentle them, Beloved, as you would gentle a wild horse.
As you would coax love from the strong muscles and striking hooves of the fearful and ranging stallion.

Be gentle with all who hurt, or weep, or mourn, or fear.
Be gentle with the survivors of Typhoon Hagibis in Japan.
Be gentle with those searching for survivors in the collapsed apartment building in Brazil.
Be gentle with the tens of thousands of migrants applying for asylum in Mexico, now that it appears that the U.S. will no longer be a possible place of refuge for them.

Wrap them in the tenderest love, Beloved, as you would a flurry of newborn kittens.
As you would make a nest of the softest blankets, in which to grow and heal and thrive.

Be gentle with our fragile Earth.
Be gentle with the students in Gambia protesting climate change, because one day, “my city Banjul could end up under water.”
Be gentle with Lebanon, facing the worst wildfires in decades.
Be gentle with Australia, where a growing drought is stirred up a dust storm so thick that day seemed to turn to night.
Be gentle with the lives we have built, with the lives we do not know how to sustain.

Help us to walk gently in our lands, in our lives.
As gently as a drop of dew on a morning flower.

Be gentle with us, O Lover of Souls.
But, oh, we do not need to ask.
For you are our Gentleness and our Beloved.

Amen.

World News This Week in Prayer – Thursday, Sept. 12, 2019

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long way from home. – African-American spiritual

Mother-Father God, we come to you when we feel lost. We come to you when we feel discouraged. We come to you when our strength fails us. We come to you when injustice seems to have the upper hand. We come to you on our knees when we can no longer stand on our own.

Hear us, O God, and heal our hearts and our world.

Our hearts are broken as Israel continues to plan to annex one-third of the occupied West Bank, virtually negating any future peace process. Our minds are confused as we seek to understand Japan’s government considering dumping radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear plant clean-up into the Pacific Ocean, even as area fishermen and the government of South Korea protest.

Hear us, O God, and heal our hearts and our world.

Our hearts are broken as we think of the 14-year-old schoolgirl in Kenya who hanged herself after being shamed in class because her uniform had been stained by menstrual blood, in spite of the 2017 law to provide free sanitary products to schoolgirls, and we cry out, “Enough is enough!” Our minds are confused as we see the continued lockdown of Kashmir by India, as food and medical care and supplies reach crucial levels, as men are killed or simply “disappeared,” putting women at high risk for violence, threatening the well-being of countless children.

Hear us, O God, and heal our hearts and our world.

Our hearts are broken as we learn that large parts of this planet have already passed the crucial climate threshold of 2 degrees Celsius of warming, as we see the people of The Bahamas attempting to recover from the devastating effects of category 5 Hurricane Dorian.

Hear us, O God, and heal our hearts and our world.

Mother-Father God, we also come to you when we feel gratitude. We come to you when we see things which give us hope. We come to you when our hearts are overflowing with joy at the actions of our fellow humans which inspire us. We come to you with our arms raised, reaching out for your ever-present hand to hold and guide us.