Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
So why has the healing of my dear people
not come about? ~ Jeremiah 8:22
Is there no balm in Gilead, Holy God? For we, your people, desperately need a balm, a healing, a sense that the desperate pain we are feeling will come to an end. Even as people walk the streets of more than 75 cities in the United States of America, demonstrating against the deaths of African-American citizens: George Floyd, Steven Taylor, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbrey, among far too many others at the hands of the police, others are demonstrating in solidarity in London, England; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Berlin, Germany; Auckland, New Zealand; Paris, France; Copenhagen, Denmark; Milan, Italy; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Dublin, Ireland; Toronto, Canada; Perth, Australia; and many more places across the globe.
We need a balm, God of Love and Peace, a healing of the sin of racism. We need to be made whole.
All of this comes in the midst of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, which continues to sicken and kill people throughout the world, even as governments disagree on how best to contain and control the spread of the virus. Italy is reopening its borders, while the death toll in Brazil has passed 30,000, and cases in the African continent exceed 160,000, even as statistics every-where are uncertain and knowledge of the behavior of the virus remains the subject of intense medical and immunological research.
We need a balm, God of All People, a healing for our troubled bodies and spirits.
Around the world, situations of pain and threat demand our attention, and yours, O God. We grieve:
- the death of Dr. Hu Weifeng in China, after four months of fighting Covid-19. He had been treating patients at Wuhan Central Hospital when he was stricken.
- with the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and PiniKura People (PKKP) of Western Australia at the destruction of 46,000-year-old Aborginal caves by mining giant, Rio Tinto, last Sunday.
- with the people of Mumbai, India, as Cyclone Nisarga makes landfall, with destructive winds and driving rains, threatening life and property.
- with a barely-literate, poor Christian couple in Pakistan who have spent the past 6 years in jail awaiting an appeal of the death sentence they received for “blasphemy”, for allegedly sending text messages insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
- the disappearances of two activists, Fang Bin and Chen Qiushi, in Wuhan, China, after their continued reporting about the Covid-19 crisis in that province, as families and friends fear they may have been killed.
We need a balm, God of Hope, a healing for the broken places in our world.
Driven to our knees by the loss and pain, our minds and hearts filled with questions and doubts, our spirits often at their lowest ebb in these recent days, we turn to you, Father-Mother God, in desperation, knowing that only in you can we find comfort, healing, a balm for those things we cannot seem to get right on our own. And, though we are not yet able to sing in our churches, we each and all can sing on our own, so we lift our quavering and tear-filled voices:
There is a balm in Gilead
to make the wounded whole;
there is a balm in Gilead
to heal the sin-sick soul.
Sometimes I feel discouraged
and think my work’s in vain,
but then the Holy Spirit
revives my soul again.
There is a balm in Gilead
to make the wounded whole;
there is a balm in Gilead
to heal the sin-sick soul.
Amen. Let it be so.
[…] Prayers of the People There are many ways our prayers become ‘world-wide.’ Today, add this prayer to all those of our own local community: https://worldinprayer.org/2020/world-news-in-prayer-thursday-4-june-2020/ […]