Sunday, September 14, 2014
Offered by Joyce Shin, Associate Pastor

Almighty God, you are good and you are great. Because of your goodness we can trust in your greatness. Like the Israelites who complained bitterly and whose faith wavered with every hardship in the wilderness, we too struggle to trust. We do not know whom to trust, when to trust, or how much to trust. Too much of our history has been spent inflating and claiming the wrong things as great. We have learned hard lessons and lived with terrible consequences of trust misplaced. Give to us and to peoples everywhere, O God, discerning minds so that, though we may be suspicious of every other attempt to gain our trust, we will ultimately place our trust and confidence in you.

We pray today for peoples whose trust is especially at risk. We pray for victims of Ebola. As they fear for their lives, help them to know to whom they can turn for the help they need. We pray for those living in the Ukraine, whose livelihoods are vulnerable: let them not be prey to those who would abuse their trust. We pray for Syrians and Iraqis who, so shaken by war, have learned no longer to count on a sense of decency or humanity.

When hearts that should beat out of love have become so hardened and when humanity, created in your image, exhibits such monstrosity, we know that something, O God, has gone terribly wrong.

So we turn to you, for you, O God, know the fellowship for which we were created. You know the harmony that justice can establish and the new order that forgiveness makes possible. Teach us these things, O God; let them be our daily bread.

Until your love is all in all, we will pray as your Son taught us: Our Father . . .

Prayer © Fourth Presbyterian Church