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 people who immigrants.
Today we think of people who are immigrants, those who are far from their home and miss it, those who struggle in a new place and those who embrace it, and those who are far from familiar places and scared. We think especially of immigrants oppressed by systems of injustice, including those imprisoned in US detention centers and those children who have been lost in the US immigration system.
We pray for those we don’t know. We pray for those we do, including [names of immigrants we know, for ourselves if we are immigrants, and for immigrants in specific detention centers]. We pray they have peace. We hope for them safety, security, healing, and confidence that they are loved and remembered. We pray for those who care for them and about them.
We pray, too, for those who oppress them, that they would immediately and unconditionally change their hearts and their ways toward justice, regardless of the cost. And when we have violated the dignity of immigrants and been complicit in their abuse or benefited from it, we seek to accept responsibility for making our wrongdoings right. We seek a just world, one in which the vulnerabilities of immigrants are embraced and not exploited.
We are thankful for immigrants and grateful for all who support them.
Above, Lance Canales and the Flood perform Woody Gutherie’s Deportees, written about a 1948 plane crash of braceros–Mexican workers legally in the US to meet the demand for labor–being forced back to Mexico. When the plane crash, the New York Times reported the names of the pilot, guard, and flight attendant but did not list the laborers killed. Canales lists and names the dead. If you are unsure of who to pray for, pray for them, their children and grandchildren, their friends, and every American who ate the food they planted, grew, and picked.
Family Foxhole 