pastor prayers

Creator, protector, lover of all life. I come to you today more aware than usual of a peculiar kind of vulnerability, and a remarkable sense of connection that comes with and from it. A terrible accident has struck a family I care about. Another tragedy has befallen a family I don’t know.

A father is struck by a storm grate while driving along his morning commute, and a family is sent reeling with questions about his health and their own future. A mother is found with stab wounds and her two children stabbed to death not long after she lost her job and reported wanting to end her own life. These are the dramatic ledes that bring to surface the tenderness of all our lives, the delicate dance we do to keep them going, to keep ourselves together in the midst of circumstances within and more often beyond our control. When there are people we’ve brought into the world whose care is our greatest vocation, we do well most days not to dwell too much on how great a responsibility it is. We couldn’t really get through the days if we let ourselves take in its depth each moment. But it is there, in the shadows of our awareness, palpable if usually unspoken.

Help us to hold our own places in this fragile web, and to keep faith in your care for us and to feel your presence with us even when the twists of fate make it seem comically absurd to believe it. Let us feel your presence in the community of human care. Let us be attentive to our everyday movements of grace, that we might come to our times of crisis with ample touchstones of sacred presence. We need those memories in our bodies and souls when when our lives seem as precarious as dandelion tufts balanced on the razor-thin edge between divine and doomed. Let ours be the breath that, when we fall, blows our lives toward the divine.

Amen.