Our family is taking time daily to pray about the current global health crisis. Our prayers will likely reference the Christian tradition, but we’ve written with an ecumenical and agnostic audience in mind.
If you’d like us to pray for you, let us know. If you’d like us to write a prayer for you or for a concern you have and share it here, just ask. You don’t have to share your name if you don’t want to, and we won’t share it or any other identifying details about you here or elsewhere.
Today, we are focusing our prayer on healthcare workers.
Today we remember the doctors, nurses, hospital and hospice and nursing home chaplains, home health aides and nursing assistants, medical technicians, lab workers, and cleaning and security staff who care for those who are ill.
We pray for those we don’t know. We pray for those we do, including [names of your own doctors and nurses as well as your friends and family members who work in healthcare]. We pray for their families and others who support them, that their family members and friends will have peace of heart as they see their loved ones go into places of danger to serve others.
We are grateful for their commitment to healing. We are thankful for their service to others. We hope for them insight and wisdom as they diagnose and treat those who are suffering, deep wells of compassion for those they serve, and the ability to rest when rest is available. We hope for them renewal daily and comfort when their hearts are heavy.
We are thankful for their heroism every day, in all the forms that it takes.
Goya’s Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta. The gift to the painter’s physician reads, “Goya, in gratitude to his friend Arrieta: for the compassion and care with which he saved his life during the acute and dangerous illness he suffered towards the end of the year 1819 in his seventy-third year. He painted it in 1820.” The image captures the tenderness between the two men, as the doctor supports the artist and encourages him to drink, Arrieta’s chin on Goya’s shoulder, the two men cheek-to-cheek in an embrace that might have been the moment Goya’s life was saved.
Family Foxhole 