Prayer requests

What a whirlwind year this has been . . .
And we are only in the month of May!
I was reading again in I Peter, and I wanted to post this passage:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (I Peter 1:3-9)

The invisible enemy, the coronavirus, has rocked our world, no? And it has changed it in ways that we may not even imagine now. It remains to be seen how many different changes it will have effected, from our social behaviors, to the worlds of business and medicine, to the ways we perceive and value our freedoms to speak, gather, and worship.

Today is our usual day of prayer. Let's remember to ask our heavenly Father to help our world recover from the pandemic. Our leaders need wisdom to find safe and healthy (and constitutional) ways to reopen our lands and help us resume a more normal life. The citizens need to be able reconnect with friends and family, to go back to our jobs, to preserve the things we cherish most about our communities. We believers need to speak out to others with words of comfort and the message of the gospel, as people deal with a world turned upside down, and as they feel the weight of grief and deal with the loss of loved ones. Our churches need to be in the business of reaching out, of showing compassion, of finding innovative ways to meet peoples' needs.
Everyone will need to be patient, and to be flexible, because our world is going to feel different, look different, and stay different for a while. Let's be gracious and extend the grace of God to a hurting world.

Father, give us strength in the coming days to be the people you would have us to be. Let us be your feet, your hands, your voice to those around us. Amen.