Holy God, you have created, loved, saved and redeemed us. Your steady hand protects and sustains us. For your mercy and grace, we worship you and give thanks. You call and invite us into discipleship and so we follow. You send us out and so we go into the world to be your light, leaven, and salt.

Although our lives can feel like a desert wilderness, amid the chaos and uncertainty we are reminded of how you provide that water; you are the Living Water that springs up all around us. And you bring healing in that water. Indeed, we believe in your power to heal, but many of us feel like the man who laid at the pool for 38 years, yearning for healing but someone else seems to get it.

So we pray for them. We pray for the ones who need healing. Through medicine, health care providers, the support of family and friends, and the desperate pleas, may your healing power be made manifest. For those anxiously awaiting procedures, test results, or answers to their medical inquiries, bring peace and relief. For those who are grieving loss, may your comforting presence surround them.

Open our eyes and hearts to be able to see the opportunities for us to be the ones to help, just as we have been helped. We thank you God for those who have shown compassion to others and thereby to Christ. Help us witness it and be inspired by it.

On this corner of Fifth and 55th, we feed those who hunger at A Place at the Table and Meals on Heels, doing what we can. But we know that hunger goes beyond our city. Throughout the world there are those who hunger and thirst. We pray for effective solutions to get food, that has been prepared, to those who need it – such as the people in Gaza.

We thank you God for loving us despite our tendency to judge and to fight among ourselves. Rather than the way of Christ who came to serve others, we want to be served. We demand our way; we quarrel with one another. And when we do, sadly it is the marginalized and oppressed who get hurt. Steel our resolve to seek first your kingdom. Transform us to be the instruments of change you desire. May it start with us as individuals and spread to our family, our community, to our leaders, local and national and throughout the world, all for the sake of Christ’s glory, who taught us to pray by saying…

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 debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.