Prayers for Africa

Farmers in West Africa walking flooded fields, looking for salvageable stems: images like this shape how the continent is prayed for here. The prayers hold communities enduring climate extremes and places where water is scarce or polluted, and they name the injustice that a continent home to so many of the world's poorest bears little responsibility for the warming.

Holding the Burden Alongside Us: A Prayer for a New School Year, World Hunger, and the Hottest Summer (September 7, 2023)

O God who holds each one of us, We lift our hearts in prayer for the students around the globe who have just started a new school year. Help students, educators, and grown ups who raise children navigate the busier season and the additional stress that may bring. This time of year brings additional tasks […]

Help Us Trust Your Unchanging Love: A Prayer for Refugees, Human Rights, and a Changing Climate (July 13, 2023)

We love you, Lord, and we’ve heard your voice… calling us to make you real and known in the world to all whom you place in our path, undergirded by prayer. How do we pray and for what? Do you hear us? Or are we asking for the wrong things? Are we too impatient or […]

Right Now: Prayers After the US Midterms and for Iran’s Protesters (November 10, 2022)

Divine Presence, right now, those living in the United States are in the exhausted wake of post-election frenzy. Rejoicing at wins and deflated by losses, enable us to regroup to continue the relentless work of securing freedom and justice for all. Stem the growth of white supremacy and hate crimes and transform the hearts of […]

The Lord’s Prayer for a Hurting World: Violence Against Women, Floods, and Global Drought (September 22, 2022)

Writer’s note: I have no idea where this version of the Lord’s Prayer came from, so I apologise for not giving credit where credit is due. I know I’ve amended it over the years, but it is something that draws me back time and again. So I am using it as a framework for this […]

How Long That Road Is: A Prayer for Shireen Abu Akleh, Journalists Killed, and Teachers (May 12, 2022)

How long that road is. But, for all the time the journey has taken, how we have needed every second of it in order to learn what the road passes by. – Dag Hammarskjold* We pray. The newspaper lies in a plastic bag in the driveway. The news shows up on our phone or TV […]

This Little Light of Mine: A Prayer Around the Continents, One Month Into the War (March 24, 2022)

God you are light. Your light reflects within us and shines forth as we connect with one another in your Love moving through us, shining forth. All around the world we hear children in all languages sing of this light… This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it […]

All Is Holy Ground: Prayers for the Arctic Refuge, Ecuador’s Oil Spill, and Tonga (February 3, 2022)

Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ‘Aina ikaPono (Hawaiian) The Life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.* Great Mystery, You have many names. On this earth there are sacred spaces, defiled and pristine, known and unknown; common places and rare wild places, side streets, landfills, broken down neighborhoods and little streams forgotten as they are […]

Sing a New Church Into Being: A Prayer for Human Dignity, Melting Permafrost, and Water (January 13, 2022)

As the scheduled writer for this week, I, like so many others, am finding life in its beauty and complexity challenging, dispiriting, frustrating, with more questions than answers and often don’t want to hear what I think God is trying to say to me as the way forward: more of the same old, same old…? […]

Creator of Us All: Indigenous Peoples Day Prayers for Ethiopia and California’s Sequoias (October 14, 2021)

“Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to humankind, humans belong to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Humanity […]

May You Be Our Peace: A Prayer in Verse for Kabul, Haiti’s Earthquake, and Hurricane Ida (September 2, 2021)

Heavenly God, Peace, peace, peace. How we long for this – this peace that only you can give: The Godly peace in which our hearts long to live. As we wake up to another day another hour, We wish that you will give us some kind of power. A power to help, a power to […]