We are not alone. We are citizens of a community, a state, a nation, and a world. All people are God’s people, and it is God’s will that we live in unity and harmony with everyone. Each of us does that by being neighborly to our neighbors, and by taking our part in the affairs of state and nation. We bow before the God who created all of us, and who desires that we should feel a kinship with everyone. Therefore let us worship the God who makes us one people in His one world.
Pastoral Prayer
Lord God, we who live for a few months a year in the knowledge that we might be hit by a deadly hurricane pray for the people of the Philippines, whose homes and lives have now been devastated by an enormous typhoon. We see the images on television, and we wonder what will happen to all the people whose lives have been completely disrupted by this huge storm. Grant spiritual relief to those who have lost family members, homes, businesses, and employment. Be with those who are plagued by hunger, because no one has yet reached them in their desperate needs. By with those who inevitably are dying, and with those who care for them. Loving God, in a disaster of this magnitude we are struck by how much we are all related to one another, and also by how difficult it is for assistance to be offered in time to help those who are in the greatest need of that assistance. Bless all the people involved in the relief effort, and well as those they are desperately seeking to help.
We pray for others elsewhere who also are in need of Thy grace and goodness: victims of crimes, victims of accidents caused either by others or by themselves, victims of the greed and rapacity of people who prey on the elderly or defenseless, victims of warfare and ethnic confrontations. We pray also for people who are fighting illness and disease, for those who are confronted by situations which overwhelm them and for which they have no defense, for those who are spiritually and psychologically adrift. Thou alone art our ultimate hope, and so we turn to Thee, asking that hope may be returned to those who feel they have lost it altogether.
We thank Thee for the relative ease and prosperity in which most of us live. We realize it is undeserved, and therefore we praise Thee all the more that we are its beneficiaries. Help us to live in gratitude each day for all Thy blessings. Especially do we thank Thee for the blessing we have through Jesus Christ, who has brought us into Thy presence, and whose guidance leads us daily in our earthly pilgrimage. Help us always to follow him and to live in his peerless teachings. All these things we pray in Jesus’ name. Now we join together in prayer as he instructed his disciples, saying, Our Father….