A Prayer for Uvalde, Texas

As we’ve watched the news reports coming in from Uvalde, Texas, our souls and our hearts just broke… again. Today, evil attacked the innocent… again.  Darkness attacked the Light… again. 
 
And too often these days, we’ve had to sit and write notes likes this. Too often these days, places that are supposed to be safe aren’t – schools and grocery stores and theaters and concerts and synagogues and churches. And we grieve. We grieve for the families who have lost loved ones. We grieve for moms and dads who’ve lost daughters and sons. We grieve for a community that’s been forever changed. And we grieve, I think, for something even bigger: we grieve for the way things used to be. We mourn the loss of that sense of security we once knew; we mourn our loss of innocence. We mourn for our country and for our sin-stained world… and we feel so small… again...

But here, in the midst of such unthinkable tragedy, we must fight. We, as men and women of faith, must fight the numbness and the human tendency to get desensitized to such an onslaught of evil. We must fight the fear. We must fight that feeling of helplessness and powerlessness. We must fight the darkness with the Light: doing what we can – whatever we can – to stem the staggering rise of violence and anger and hopeless that too often gets acted out with unthinkable, tragic consequences. 
 
And so, as we grieve with and mourn for our brothers and sisters down south. We lift our hearts in prayer: we pray for all those who have been lost, and we pray for their families. We pray for the students, teachers, workers, and administrators in the Uvalde CISD. We pray for all the families affected. We pray for the first responders. And for every church that will minister the grace and love and healing of Christ in the wake of this shooting. We pray for that whole community, and we pray for our world. 
  
We pray. We mourn. We grieve. 
 
And we resolve ourselves to channeling our anger, frustration and fear into productive avenues of God’s power and grace – not with empty words, but with thoughtful, compassionate action… and not just for people and communities like us, but for all people who stand in need of the healing (mind, body, and soul) that only Jesus provides! 
 
“The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”  – Romans 8:26 – ​