Our Mother, Father in heaven.
Thank you for your Presence within and through us and all that lives.
Thank you for teaching us how to pray.
Reveal to us who you are.
We see you in the wonder of discovery like the bee expert who found 800,000 bees in an ancient British forest.
We see you in 12 year-old Abraham Olagbegi, a cancer survivor, who used his wish for “Make-A-Wish” to feed the homeless in his community.
We see you in the beauty of the Blood Moon lunar eclipse this week, the longest eclipse of the century.
May your Kin-dom come,
It is easy to see so many places that need the in-breaking of the Kin-dom. Where separation is the story instead of interconnection and interdependence.
We pray for migrants, from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, on the Belarus border as they try to get into Poland and the European Union and have become trapped between Belarusian soldiers encouraging them to enter Poland and Polish soldiers pushing them back, sometimes with violence on both sides. May they feel the warmth of You on the freezing nights and Your comfort within their despair and longing for a place to call home again.
We pray for the ceasing of violence in prisons in Quito, Ecuador where 68 inmates died this weekend during a prolonged gun battle between rival gangs. This follows an event that left over 100 inmates dead in September. We pray for peace, we pray for those that mourn, we pray for wisdom for those trying to change the system.
We pray for peaceful and life-giving change in Cuba as there is a new pro-democracy energy rising.
We pray for the people of Sudan where there is increasing tension and violence in response to last month’s coup.
We pray for the people of Uganda where a suicide bomber that killed at least three and injured many. Another attack in a series of bomb explosions in Uganda in recent weeks.
your desires be done
It is clear, Holy One, that you desire the thriving of each created thing. May we also desire it.
We give thanks for the positive movement that came out of the COP26 UN Climate Summit that over 200 nations attended. We pray the many words spoken and promises made will bring the needed changes. And we pray for even braver demands and actions made as the set agreements place us short of the needed goals for a livable future.
On Earth as in heaven.
Each in our own places are feeling the ways our planet is waving its red flag.
We pray for those affected by a deadly storm in Vancouver, Canada, severing transportation systems. Called the “worst storm in a century.”
We pray for clear air and change in practices as schools have been shut down and work limited in Delhi, India due to toxic air pollution.
Give us today our daily bread.
We pray for the people of Afghanistan where 14 million face daily hunger.
We pray for those in need of the daily bread of health. As another Covid-19 wave sweeps across Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Russia.
Keep us in the flow of forgiveness with you and others.
Forgive us for the ways we are each complicit in living into the sin of separation instead of the trust and love of the constant pulse of interconnection.
Do not lead us into temptation.
May the leaders of the United States and China realize that the time for old paradigms of conflict needs to be abandoned for imaginative cooperation in the challenges that the human race is facing on earth.
Free us from the Evil One.
We pray for open hands of release for all the ways that we grasp and cling in fear and greed that hurt the “least of these” the earth, others and ourselves.
May the shipping challenges in the United States help us awake to the system’s dead-end ways and let our creativity move us towards more local and sustainable ways of consuming.
We give thanks for Myanmar’s release of the American journalist. And we pray with hope for transformation in a constricted government.
For You are God
You are ablaze with glory and beauty!
We give thanks for all the places and ways we see your beauty living through us and rippling forth.
We give thanks for the thousands of climate activists around the world bringing their voices and creativity to give the Earth a voice. We see this in artists like Vlad Sokin, a Russian documentary photographer whose images in his book Warm Waters bring attention to communities around the world where waters are rising.
We give thanks for churches in Honduras who lead community programs for youth to show them a life outside of gangs and violence.
For these and the many, many moment-by-moment acts of goodness, generosity and love not seen on newspages but that knit us together in You.
May it be so. It is so.
Amen, Amen.
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