Friends, naturally, sometimes we are so involved in our own lives that we may not readily recognize how we might pray for others. Here is a prayerful look at this week's news:
World New This Week In Prayer - Thurs., April 29, 2010
God's compassion is over all that God has made. (Psalm 145)
God's compassion is over all that God has made in the Gulf of Mexico.
God's compassion is over all the sea creatures who are suffering, all who have died in the waters there and over all life that has been destroyed. God's compassion is over all who are working tirelessly to lessen the massive environmental damage. God's compassion is over the coastlands, the land and the fragile wetlands threatened by the oil spill.
God's compassion is over all that God has made. In Mexico, God's compassion is over victims of violence and the gunmen who stormed into a bar, dragged out eight people and killed them in the parking lot - and over those involved in so many other incidents of violence in this country, including the murders of two human rights activists in the state of Oaxaca: Beatriz Carino, director of the Mexican human rights group CACTUS, and Jyri Antero Jaakkola, a human rights observer from Finland.
God's compassion is over children and their families in China living in fear of violent attacks against young children. This week 28 children and three adults were injured by a man with a knife at a nursery school in the eastern province of Jiangsu, China, the third such attack in a month.
God's compassion is over the people and animals of Manila (Philippines), who live in the shantytown outside the city that was swept with a huge fire, destroying about 300 houses and leaving about 7,000 people homeless. Strong winds and scorching heat contributed to the rapid spread of flames.
God's compassion is over animals and people suffering with hunger and thirst in a growing food crisis in Niger which threatens more than half of the country's 14 million people. U.N. Humanitarian Chief John Holmes was in Niger this week to call attention to the deepening food crisis brought on by drought and poor harvests. The food shortage is a result of irregular rainfall in 2009 that led to poor harvests and severe lack of water and grazing land for animals. Many animals are hungry, growing weak and beginning to die, and many people are abandoning their homes in search of food and water.
God's compassion is over the prisons of Zambia, where, for punishment, inmates are commonly stripped naked and held in solitary confinement in small, windowless cells, sometimes for days on end, in ankle-to-calf-high water contaminated with their own excrement. The abysmal living conditions were exposed in a report released this week by Human Rights Watch and two African human rights groups. Prisons in Zambia have long been neglected, and prison conditions are often abominable. Inmates are malnourished and mistreated by overworked staff while they endure long and uncertain waiting periods before there is any hope of legal assistance or a trial.
With God's compassion over us all, and over all of creation, we lift our prayers for these and other places in the news this week. We pray to the God who suffers within all that is. We pray that human compassion will respond to bring life and justice to all that God has made. As we hear the news around the world this week, we pray that our compassion will increase, that we will not turn away but increase our willingness to suffer with those who are in need.
O God whose compassion is over all of creation, grant us the will to respond with compassion wherever we hear of the suffering of the earth, and all who dwell upon it.
Amen.
These prayers written by World in Prayer - a ministry of the Episcopal Church of St. John the
Baptist Lodi, California, USA, and is written by a team of writers representing different denominations throughout the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom.
