God, I don’t have enough tears for 400,000. If I cried for forty days and forty nights, it wouldn’t be enough.
So instead I’ll light the candle–and watch the flame gasping for breath.
And when I blow it out, I’ll bathe my face in the smoke. I taste ashes on my tongue.
Grief is never enough. The lives cut short, every single one of them, is a tragedy.
Anger rises, and I let it wash and let it go, because this anger is sadness in disguise.
I breathe in, and out, and feel the prickles of oxygen that others can no longer breathe.
God I don’t have enough tears for 400,000 people.
But you do. Mourn with me please I pray. Every tear for one of your beloved. May they fill the ocean with the salt of sorrow, so that we can never again let people die because they are essential or forgotten.
Mourn with me, I pray.
Amen.
Feel free to use/adapt with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta
Pandemic Prayers & Links to Support my Writing
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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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