God,

We need you now.

We needed you yesterday. We need you today. We need you tomorrow. We need you now.

We need you to do something. To stop the brutal unfathomable violence that is surfacing in every part of our world.

We need you to change the hearts of lawmakers. We need you to change all of our hearts so that we may not point the finger at those around us, and recognize that it is not “we” versus “them,” but it is us.  It is our fellow human beings.

Help us to be the change. Teach us. Move us today. Not to wait until tomorrow, but to care for all of our siblings. Our black and brown siblings who are being mercilessly killed. Our children whose lives are being cut so very short. Our people everywhere who are either killing or being killed.

We cry out to you, God, on behalf of the unbearable cries we hear from the parents who will never see their children again. We cry out on behalf of the sibling who lost their last family member.  We cry out on behalf of the entire families murdered. We cry out that you will change our lawmakers’ hearts. We cry out, God. We cry out to you because, while we know that we must act, that you must act, that we all must do something, we also need to talk about it. We need to talk about it and not push it away. And so, we still choose to talk with you. To demand that something will change in our broken world.

While it is broken, God, while we pray that you may act today, we also ask for your comfort. We ask for your comfort in the midst of the unfathomable. We ask for your comfort because we need it to give us strength to keep going.

We ask so much of you, God, and yet we know that you are the one who can stir our confused, broken, suffering, and deeply-grieving hearts.

God, we have experienced the utter murder of the innocents. We will never understand it, God. We know that there is nothing to understand. What we try our best to remind ourselves is that your balm is still there. You are holding us because, God, there is no way we can hold ourselves.

God, we lift up to you the families and community left behind after the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, U.S., at Robb Elementary School where at least 19 children and two teachers were killed.

God, we lift to you our continued collective grief over the mass shooting at a Tops Friendly Markets supermarket in Buffalo, New York, U.S.

We lift up to you the people of North Korea where a Covid-19 outbreak continues to accelerate.

We lift to you the now-captured city of Mariupol, Ukraine, where we now see unfathomable footage following weeks of Russian bombardment.

We lift up the people in Oklahoma, U.S., where lawmakers gave final approval to a bill banning abortion at any point during pregnancy, which will likely establish the most wide-ranging restrictions in the United States.

We lift up those in Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the United States as we hear about the outbreak of Monkeypox.

We lift up Taiwan and China as tensions between the two countries heighten.

We lift up soccer players representing the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams who will finally receive the same pay regardless of gender.

God, we so clearly need you now. We need you in this broken, confused world where our youngest and our oldest are ruthlessly murdered all around the world. We will never understand it, and so that’s why we desperately need you. We need you to come to this world and make change in all of our hearts. So that one day the broken-hearted may be healed, and the creation of more broken hearts may cease.

Amen.