March 5, 2023

Offered by Joseph L. Morrow, Associate Pastor

Loving God, you are our Source, our beginning, and the Creator of all. We who have at times called you father and mother approach you as children who know your caring regard, believing, as the psalms say, that you are acquainted with all our ways and closer to us than we are to ourselves.

In the freshness of this morning your providence has provided, we pray that we might grow in your likeness, having hearts as large and capacious as your very own—indeed, that our whole selves would be made ready to see, hear, and respond to the beauty and burden of this world as only you can.

Let us bask in the light of your countenance this day so that we might see our world and lives as you do.

Help us see the way you delight in this world, its many peoples and cultures, its majestic places. We pray that you might help us to bless these glimpses of your goodness with our own perpetual stewardship and care.

Allow us also to see this world’s distress. Turn not our eyes from the scourges of poverty, of unfulfilled opportunity, of toil without reward or end. Turn not our eyes from wars that cut short the dreams of the young and destroy what the aged spent a lifetime building. Turn not our eyes from diseases that ravage whole communities and cause our bodies war against themselves.

So with the blessing of your sight, we pray for the people of Ukraine and Russia. We pray for peace in the midst of great power politics and vulnerable republics yearning for freedom and security. We hold close to heart all those communities feeling the brunt of COVID-19 and other pandemics throughout the world, praying for their healing and perseverance.

Might we see, through your eyes, a future yet to be. The playgrounds filled with the joyful laughter of little ones. Might we see streets of this city and others bustling with vitality, where strangers become neighbors and walk among each other with hope. So, with the blessing of your sight, we pray for the Spirit to move through our city and communities, bringing renewal.

Attune our ears, O Great Provider, that we may hear, as you do, the voices of those long silenced. Let us receive the silence of those who mourn because their loved ones don’t come back from a night out or return home from duty. We pray for those who lose their lives on our city streets and in a country too awash in violence and too in love with weaponry. We especially lift up to your care the loved ones of Officer Andres Vasquez-Lasso.

Comfort us, O Lord, as we grapple with losses that simply do not make sense and never will. But leave us not captive to futility. Rather help us hear the calls of the distressed, the stories that our loved ones wish to tell in the twilight of life or confined to the hospital bed. For them and all those who are ailing in mind, body, or spirit, may we become ministers of your grace and compassion.

Having seen the world for what it is and could be, having heard the cries of distress and shouts of joy,  we ask for new inspiration and the courage to live out our convictions to justice, peace, healing, and reconciliation. Continue to gather together the loose strands of our community and weave us into a tapestry covering the world in boundless hope.

We raise these prayers in the name of your Beloved One, who told us of your steadfast love and faithfulness, in the name of Jesus, who taught those of us who would follow him to pray, Our Father …

Prayer © Fourth Presbyterian Church