Action 2: Pray

Remember that prayer is not a substitute for action.  Prayer, like love, is action. God listens to us and hears our prayers.

Talk to your father in heaven. Open up. Lay your burdens down. Share with God your thoughts, emotions, and questions regarding anything – including and especially the senseless violence in Ukraine. He knows your needs. Ask him to meet them.

Intercede in prayer on behalf of others. Ask God to protect those fleeing, heal those injured by, and grant peace to those dying from the senseless violence in Ukraine. Pray that his peace which passes all understanding would fill all those traumatized first- and second-hand by the suffering of those they love and by the suffering of those they see but don’t even know.

Pray for those humbly receiving these foreigners, widows, and orphans as friends. Ask God to bless them and their families abundantly for and through their acts of hospitality – and multiply their resources to meet their needs.  As with Jesus’ own miracles of provision – wine, loaves, fishes and the like – pray and trust that God will be glorified in the process.

Perhaps most importantly, pray earnestly, without exception, and without ceasing for those perpetuating this violence. Pray – even if in anger and through gritted teeth – for the Russian soldiers, their commanders, and their President, Vladimir Putin. Pray that each of their hearts, and the weapons they command, would be broken for the people of Ukraine. Pray that their lives would be transformed – and the world around them preserved – by the renewal of their minds through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Pray for peace - an immediate end to the violence, gracious dialogue, and a truthful and transparent accounting of atrocities committed in this and every other war as a means to healing and reconciliation. Pray not only for an end to violence, but that an imaginative, active, pervasive, and long-lasting peace would prevail: in a word, shalom.

Reflection

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