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 pray for people experiencing grief. We know that COVID-19 is not the only tragedy people are living with right now. Even as a global pandemic rages, we are affected by other disasters, struggle through other crises, and grieve other losses.
Today we pray for people who are grieving losses of every kind.
We pray for those we don’t know and for those we do, including [names of people who are grieving]. We name their griefs in recognition of their suffering. [Name the tragedies, crises, and personal afflictions we know our loved ones carry now or that we carry.]
We pray for those suffering grief that they prepared for and grief that came unannounced. We pray for those living with grief that they cannot envision ending, that they do not know how to survive, and that is reshaping their life in ways unimaginable. We pray for those whose hearts feel like lead, whose bodies are exhausted but cannot rest, and whose minds cannot make sense of the tragedies they are facing.
We hope for them rest, comfort, and companionship. We hope for them friends to hold their grief. We hope for them all they need, every moment of every day.
We are thankful for the depth of love that grief reminds us we are capable of.
Above, Van Gogh’s At Eternity’s Gate.
Family Foxhole 