We invite you to join us this week in the prayers that we prayed in worship this Sunday, May 17:
Creating, loving God,
in the beginning you made us, and all that is,
and from the beginning,
you have accompanied and sustained us along the way.
You have created us for life in community.
When your people have hungered
you have provide manna in the desert,
oil and flour and bread,
loaves and fishes,
and you have charged us with the care of each other,
and particularly for the most vulnerable in our midst.
Help us to share in your work
of providing daily bread,
and remaking a world where everyone has enough.
We pray for this world suffering in pandemic.
We pray for healing for those who are sick,
for comfort for those who grieve,
for an end to pandemic.
We pray especially today for those who have lost jobs,
and who are searching for ways
to support and feedtheir families.
Give us wisdom and compassion
to find ways to provide for that need
and to create new opportunities for work,
work that comes with a just and living wage.
In this week that has seen the relaxation of sheltering orders,
we pray for individual and collective compassion and common sense.
Help us to see our lives interconnected with the lives of others,
our health bound up with the health of each other,
and give us wisdom to choose ways of
sheltering and wearing face-coverings and moving in the world
that respect and honor life, rather than endangering it.
We pray for our life in community here,
and we come grieving the loss of
Toni Henry and Byron Mauzy.
We give you thanks for the lives they lived,
for all they brought into the life of this community,
for all the ways they blessed and nurtured their families.
We pray for their families as they grieve,
and as we grieve, we give you thanks
for the sure promise of resurrection
that we have in Jesus Christ.
We continue in prayer for this earth
spinning in a climate emergency of our making.
Help us find sustainable ways of living
that care for and repair the world we have harmed.
Thank you for placing us in this world,
to live lives together,
in creative collaboration,
for giving us hearts of compassion
to see the deep need of the world,
and the power, by your Spirit,
to do something about it, together.
Loved by you, and drawn together
with you and with all people
in every time and place,
we join together saying the Prayer that Jesus Taught:
Our Father/Mother, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen.