photo by Jozsef Szabo
Loving God,
We pray for the loved ones of those who were unjustly and brutally murdered in Buffalo. We pray for their ability to sleep at night. We pray for their ability to experience peace, which in this case, must surpass all understanding. We pray for their grief process. May Your love cover them, protect them, comfort them without ceasing in days, weeks, months and years to come. These are children, grandchildren, spouses and siblings, best friends whose lives have been cut short by hate. May the lens of eternity provide hope to an unjustifiable, irreparable situation in our earthly midst.
We pray for the Black community of Buffalo, for their sense of safety and, I'm grieved to need to ask, also for their actual safety.
We lift up the communities of color across the nation, as we receive this news of a shooter in Buffalo targeting our Black neighbors, reaching an anniversary of the El Paso shootings which targeted our Hispanic neighbors and grieving a shooting of Taiwanese neighbors in a church in Laguna Woods, just on the heels of another anti-Asian shooting at a Korean-run hair salon in Dallas.
In the last 40 years, statistics show us that an easy, overwhelming majority of mass shooters are white neighbors. I'm so ashamed that this is true, especially in reflecting on how often mass shootings are clear hate crimes against people of U.S. minority races or ethnicities, if not some other distinguishing factor that is not an actual burden to anyone, and is actually instead a gift to the world!
May those who need convicting of racial hate crimes and mass shootings as a problem to deal with, by all means, be very convicted. May they seek very seriously the Lord's help in taking action to be part of a solution which upholds the safety of all of God's children, all of our neighbors, all of our sisters and brothers.
May my own convictions around this remain steadfast; may I stay true to this commitment myself, as I ask others to marry their actions and words to this cause, with God's help.
May my siblings of many faith traditions, those who dialogue with me at The Church Lab, unite in lifting up those so hurt and broken by this injustice, and may we be a space for both grief and conviction expressed in our conversations to then find its way into cooperative actions which seek justice, love mercy and help us walk humbly with our higher powers, as well as walk with all our neighbors, in tireless pursuit of jubilant equity and love.
Amen.