Dear God, I don’t want to pray for my enemies today. Because today my enemies are the enemies of children. They are those who can see crying children and ignore their pleas for safety and basic healthcare. They arrest people and tear families apart. They rationalize their hate by dehumanizing others. And yet, I cannot dehumanize these individuals, because if I do, somehow, they’ve won. So I’m praying for my enemies today. A prayer that cries out to the Lord “How Long?” A prayer that rends my soul, a prayer that places everything I can’t handle directly into the palm of God’s hands. And then I cry a little bit, and try to figure out how to be vocal and act in ways that reflect my prayer. Because, I remember, that’s how prayer works. Help us all Lord, I pray. Restore us. Remind us all of our humanity, and be with us we pray. Amen. 
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Author: katyandtheword
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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