Contributed By: Rev. Mark Breese
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Pastor Mark is the Agency Minister and the VP of Ministry & Community partnerships at Community Missions.

Holy Creator, we are in need of your presence. Though we still dwell so close and even walk upon our mother earth, from who’s very self you made us, we feel no comfort. Help us to see your healing work around us so that we may have hope. Help us to see the very healing powers that, given a chance, you have instilled in the earth.

Open our eyes to the sights of nature that have returned to urban landscapes. Open our ears to the sound of the wind and the birds that has risen because of the quite we have had to unleash by standing still for a time. Open our nose and mouths to the smell and taste of air being unburdened because we have had to stop all our rushings to-and-fro.

Help us to see O God how the actions we are taking to slow and end the illness and suffering we and neighbors on earth are facing, is reflected in the healing of nature around us. Given the chance to catch her own breath, the mother earth, from whom we were all born, can heal and continue to nurture us. Help us take notice

Just so, O God our creator, strengthen us so that we continue to show our love for one another by doing the hard work of continuing to keep practicing the physical distance that keeps everyone safe, even as we now enter new phases of openness.

Holy creator you gave us minds—created them miraculously from the dust of the universe. You instilled in us the very ability to create life, to find ways to sustain it and heal it by what would seem magic way back when you chose to come and be with us, to walk and eat and sleep and laugh and cry with us, as one of us, fully human.

The wonders of what your creative spirit instilled in each one of us and has allowed us to do, the healing arts you have given us the ability to create, would be beyond belief to the generation of your time among us.

Now we call on you to breathe the spirit of your even greater Eternal Wisdom into the wondrous mortal wisdom you have given us, so that we might find the treatments and vaccines that will end our suffering.

Holy One, at this very moment there are those who are stricken with this illness that has risen up among us. Breathe your life breath into each one of them so that they may have healing. Bring your comfort to those who fear for loved ones they cannot even visit. Bring peace and clarity of mind to all who are filled with anxiety and worry. Breathe the strength of your Will into those who care for the sick and all who are struggling to cope. Expand their skill and their compassion so that they may continue to be the agents of your healing presence. And Holy One wrap your protecting arms around those who are called by you to be protectors of life, so that they may be well and continue their sacred work.

O Creator, we ask for more healing still, because we are in such sore need of you. These times have revealed that the lack of justice of all kinds is still with us. Pointless divisions based on race have remained with us for far too long. The oppression of needless poverty in a land of such plenty has laid bare our sin of indifference, and now we see it revealed in the disproportionate suffering and death of the poor and the death of those living under this re-revealed economic and racial oppression that has never really left us. Holy Creator of Justice, do not let this moment of clarifying light pass us by. Strengthen us to bring about a healing of equity and justice for all your created children.

O God of all the universe, let your healing fall upon us in all these many ways. Let your love that is the source the healing of mother earth, the healing our bodies and minds, and the healing of justice flow across your created world. Let the love that is your healing touch us. In the healing of our bodies, of our whole selves, let the love you have for us, that you give to us to because we so desperately need it, will do more than fill us full, but will flow from us like rivers of living water, of living love.  Amen.

Pastor Mark