People's Prayer April 11, 2010

By Bob Savaria

Mother father God, we thank you for your creation - this dynamic, ever-changing and ever-challenging world we live in! You leave us breathless at the wonders we discover through our observations, our discourses, our science, our art, our music, our song, our philosophy, our theology...our everyday lives of joy and struggle. We marvel at your creation and are often overwhelmed. (pause) Yet the pace of worldly change is brutal, frightening and so difficult to cope with that we often become numb, unable to engage. We often feel powerless in the face of such change. We retreat into complacency and short-sightedness...into ourselves! We become depleted of energy, of vision, of caring.

We need your help God. We need your love, your understanding, your insight, your inspiration, your strength and patience to listen and learn from, and with others. We need to see what they see, to feel what they feel, to better understand this evolving world so that our understanding of You may also evolve. We seek a bond, a state of connectedness with our world, its people, its animals, its fish, its deserts and all things existing in our world... to feel pain, joy and sorrow when they do. We need this to understand, to become a whole people living in your world.

Response...

Mother father God, we need your help to become more open, more trusting, more accepting of change; to become at one with you and our world. We yearn to always act and behave as you would have us do. You sent Jesus to teach us. Help us to relearn the lessons he taught us. Give us courage and strength to examine our daily acts, to let go our hurtful, unsustainable ways, and to change what we desire, what we value and what we do. Please see us by our acts and not by our thoughts or our words.
We pray, O God, for the peoples of the world who are suffering from injustice, war, natural disasters, starvation, economic and political oppression., We confess our lack of caring, our selfishness, our inability to act in the best interest of our world. Give us the will to act so that we may regain the trust of those who suffer. We name these peoples and places in silence or aloud.

Response...

Father mother God, we pray for the those people in our community who are: suffering from illness, abuse, oppression, lost or broken relationships, economic hardship, lack of care and opportunity; or who are preparing themselves for difficult challenges or an uncertain future. We ask that you help us take the time to connect with them... not to fix their lives, but to feel their pain, their anguish, to accompany them on parts of their journey through life, so that we may gain a better understanding of the world that is in and around us. Help us to see these people as part of ourselves. We name these people in silence or aloud, Audrey Fukuzawa, Marg Porteous, Bilal, Sandy fishleigh and her brother Doug Hilliard, Sally Preiner, Chris Ghort and family on the death of his mother, Mary Romaniuk and family on the death of her mother, Willy Malate`s mother in Indonesia, Georgia Helleiner recovering from surgery, Lyn Gaetz preparing for surgery....

Response...

We pray with the church in Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore:
We praise you for the beauty we see around us, for the infinite variety of your creation – the skies, the mountains, the valleys, the plains, the rivers and the seas.

The bounty of your creation adds richness and providence to our daily life.
We thank you for the gift of life, for the opportunities we have to share in your purposes as co-creators and for grace never to turn back on our responsibility for the preservation of your creation.

AMEN