Prayers from God’s children in circumstances of risk and instability

The wise preacher wrote: “For everything there is a season”, and “the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning.” Many of us have moved in to the mourning house this season, still longing to be wise while in isolation. I believe that faith creates connection and generates hope. Neighbor-care is an act of faith expressing itself through love - for all God’s children.

Today I am mourning with those who mourn, and feeling helpless and stressed right beside them. This too is connection, no matter how sad and embittered by the world, for it shapes my determination of what I am to do on the other side of this season. Let’s pray together

Lord we come to you this morning, like empty pitchers to a full fountain: with no merit of our own. Hearts bowed beneath our knees, our knees in some lonesome valley.

We’re gathered together this morning in heart and mind - to bring you prayers from your precious children in circumstances of risk and instability.

Holy Spirit would you stop by? Stop by and sit at our bedsides, stop by and stretch these prison bars, stop by and send refreshing. Show yourself, Lord. Show us that you’re listening.

Listen Lord: We languish in cages. In solitary confinement. In detention camps and debtors prisons. We are babies and youth crushed by separation from our families. We are loved ones sentenced to helplessness and pain. We are without health, we are losing hope, and we hate it here.

Listen Lord: We are starving. We are poisoned by water that was meant to give us life. We are parents unable to provide for our children. We are children working to provide for our parents. We are wondering if our next meal is coming, We cannot find food, we are losing faith, and we hate it here.

Listen Lord: We are aging, cast aside.

In conversations - overlooked

In pandemics - denied

In hospice and retirement homes, in intensive care units,

It is told to us, and shown, and implied

That life’s meaning expires after 80 years, so all that’s left to us is to die.

We are apparently too old to still be breathing,

And we hate it here.

Lord, listen to your children this morning.

Give us a vision of liberation against all odds. Shake the foundation of these systems that keeps us from being free. Send us your sacred songs at midnight. To carry us through, like Paul and Silas. To keep us convinced, like Fannie Lou, that though we are pressed in by turmoil - and oh these troubled, terrifying places, oh how we hate it here! - yet, O Lord, you listen.

And by your example, you are teaching us to listen too.

Scripture

Acts 16 - Paul & Silas jailed after helping an enslaved woman who was exploited by her abusers

Psalm 71.9- do not cast me off when I am elderly, do not forsake me when my strength is gone

Stories of the Saints: Fannie Lou Hamer

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/sayitplain/flhamer.html

https://eji.org/news/remembering-1963-fannie-lou-hamer-arrested-and-beaten-winona-mississippi/

Sacred Songs

Take Me to Alley, Gregory Porter

AD 2000, Erykah Badu

I am Going Through, the Hawkins Family

Listen Lord: We Hate it Here - Day Two