This Week's Prayer

Source of healing and wholeness we call by many names,

We pray in order to cultivate gratitude, for gratitude makes life’s beauty and glory present to us.

We are thankful for the longer, warmer, greener days of spring, for the flowers blooming, for gorgeous days.
We are thankful for our youth: their wisdom surprises, and their promise delights.
We are thankful as well for our elders: their wisdom is no surprise, and their fulfillment of their promise delights.
We are thankful for the eradication of Rubella from North and South America, and that child and maternal mortality rates in Rwanda over the last 15 years have declined by 50%.
We are thankful that in Mexico, drug-related murders are significantly down for the third year in a row, and that 460 Nigerian captives have been rescued from Boko Haram camps.

We pray in order to articulate our hopes, for the yearning of the heart should not be silent.

We hope the 300 schoolgirls still missing from Boko Haram abduction may yet be alive and be released.
We hope for recovery and healing for the thousands in Nepal, India, and Afghanistan struggling to deal with the results of the earthquake.
We hope for relief for the people from the Middle East and North and Sub-Saharan Africa seeking refuge and facing violence, hunger, disease, and death.
We hope for a new and serious commitment to address the many causes of conflict between police and minority communities.
We hope our country will awaken to pay attention to poor and minority communities not just when they march and demonstrate but all the time, as our president said, "because we consider those kids our kids."

We pray in order to orient our minds and hearts toward joy in all that is beautiful and good, and toward service that makes us instruments of the realization of our hopes.