BINDING SOUL AND SOURCE
Prayers for the Church Street Family
February 8, 2021
Rev. Dr. Jan Buxton Wade
O Evening Host, you call us with slashes of orange light seeping through the darkening horizon; your invitation beckons us home again into the enfolding freedom from our daily routine. Here in this calm closing, you offer breathing space to remember how you have carried us through the hours and how you are opening windows and doors to free us from our tensions. May we enter these moments in quiet reflection . . . . . . . . . . For your gift of this day of living under your glorious sun, we bow in gratitude.
Fortress of Forgiveness, we are a rushed people, and in our haste, our words have punctured suggestions made in earnest and ideas that showed promise. Our unkindness and lack of grace blindsided even those closest to us. For the ways in which we have failed you, our sisters and brothers, and ourselves, we ask for holy pardon, especially for . . . . . . . . . . . . We also pray you would show us how to pardon those who have caused us pain, particularly . . . . . . . . . . Perhaps if we picture your candle of grace shining above each one who has hurt us, we would see that their own struggles are no different than our own.
As you work through us to further your own purposes, we ask that you would infuse our national leaders with you new vision, granting that the groundwork they lay will support a system where all have ample opportunity to thrive in this good land you have given us. Discipline us to pray daily for our leaders at every level, as we also pray for our fellow pilgrims across the world, for ourselves, and for each of these Church Street friends whose situations are already known to you:
- Gratitude for the life and witness of a cherished colleague
- Ten offer gratitude for virus vaccinations
- Thanksgiving for minimal side effects of chemo
- Family grateful that father’s illness has stabilized
- Many express thanks for communion worship
- Gratitude: Family of four healed from Covid
- Thanksgiving for vaccinations for family members in UK and Missouri
- Thankful for answered prayers of wider vaccine distribution
- Courage for one with newly diagnosed cancer
- Dear sister depressed from isolation
- Prayers for two in treatment for pancreatic cancer
- Comfort for family, husband killed in accident
- Healing: Husband in deep depression
- Healing for one suffering leg pain
- Pray for mother recovering from brain bleed
- Discernment for one making weighty decision
- Strength for friend very ill physically and emotionally
- Families mourning recent deaths of loved ones
- Continued healing for heart patient
- Healing for one whose cancer has spread
We conclude our prayers, Holy One, looking forward to your healing touch of sleep. Watch over all who are closest to our hearts, we pray, and with the dawn, may we place our steps in the footprints of Jesus as we walk his road to heaven:
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.
