BINDING SOUL AND SOURCE
Prayers for the Church Street Family
October 6, 2020
Rev. Dr. Jan Buxton Wade
O Beauty of Holiness, we are a tense people, eagerly answering the world’s cry for productivity. But you stop us in our tracks with the startling beauty you have sown around us. Lead us to look upward today, to treasure the drifting clouds carrying their secret messages, to take in the tonic of bracing air, to cherish the colored leaves waving their hellos, to receive the blessings of birdsong floating in the breeze. Your creation breathes a silent re-creation within us whenever we give it a chance. Make us new this day, make us holy.
Hear us Lord, for we trust in you.
God of All Kindness, because you gave us your only Son to share your love and to become our example, we know that you value us more deeply than we can comprehend. Therefore, we bow the knee of our hearts to ask anew for your deliverance of our nation. We are battling a fierce virus, bracing ourselves for local and national elections, endeavoring to carry on with our jobs, attempting to educate our children, and seeking ways to protect the older and most vulnerable among us. There are surely harsher challenges washing upon other shores, but we are grasping the frayed ends before us, wondering if our stamina will hold. Keep our hands and hearts steady, we pray, for we believe in your own time you will bind all things together for our good.
Hear us Lord, for we trust in you.
O One Who Travels With Us, we walk your road of mercy, knowing that you will lead us past fear to find hope, past loneliness to find companionship, past anger to find resolution, past suspicion to find trust. In that knowledge, we turn our thanksgivings over to your joy, our concerns over to your mercy, knowing you will keep our feet firm along the way:
- Gratitude: happy couple looking forward to upcoming wedding
- One is thankful for a long-overdue visit with an old friend
- Prayers appreciated: wife’s blood pressure has returned to normal
- Gratitude for medical science developing virus medications
- Thanksgiving for police, 1st responders & healthcare workers who continue to diligently serve the public, despite the risks
- Prayers for one having knee surgery today, that all goes well
- Protection from virus for daughter working at the White House
- Prayers for wisdom & focus: 3 members taking the Bar Exam this week
- Easing of anxiety & for one having gum surgery today
- Cherished son with PTSD related to combat, for grace & healing
- Comfort & healing for all grieving recent deaths of loved ones
- Pray for protection: daughter still traveling to ORE to begin work
- For God’s healing mercies to surround a troubled soul
- Continued healing of member’s dangerous infection
- Strength & courage for husband, prime caregiver for his ill wife
- Healing mercies for a member recovering from knee surgery
- Pray for healing: parents grieving the death of their infant son
Loving God, thank you for the way you give us hope and courage beyond ourselves.
Hear us Lord, for we trust in you.
Gather up our prayers for our own church today, and for the church universal. And though we are separated, we remain one single body, united in spirit and in purpose, offering the words Jesus taught his first disciples:
Our Father 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 trespasses as we forgive those who trespass 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.
