Prayer in the Aftermath

God
it is devastating
we are all in shock
the roads
simply washed away
the houses
gone

We pray for the people
the communities
towns
all struck
by a hurricane
some the 3rd in a year
a year’s worth of rain
in a day or two



This kind of change causes us
to use words like
resilient
rebuild
tough

But meanwhile
our souls ache

Because nothing
makes sense
And it’s hard to
take in

Is that why
it is called
after-math
Because
nothing adds up
anymore?

God help us to
walk as slowly
as we need to

to remember
to be
community

with

one another
and to invest
in the long term

God help us
For we feel helpless
and alone
Help us to find
each other

To build
into
each
other

Help us to find
ways to attend
to building
safely
to being
energy efficient
and all the things

But most of all

Help us to be
A community
that
cares
for one another

So that
we do not have
to be
so exhausted
Or feel
alone
When
we do
these hard things
we pray.
Amen

Feel free to use/adapt/share with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta “KatyandtheWord’

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Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. She now works at Capital CFO plus as the Non Profit Director. All opinions expressed on this blog are her own and do not reflect those of Capital CFO plus. 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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