God.

We are tired.

Our bodies are tired from the anticipation of what could happen and from the disruption of all our usual patterns.
Our minds are tired from planning and adjusting and adapting, from practicing patience.
Our hearts are weary with stories of sickness and suffering, income loss and food inadequacies.
Our spirits feel brittle, as if we were looking at the dry bones of dreams and plans and promises.

Some of us are working and worrying more than ever. Some of us have more time and less certainty than we could have ever dreamed.

And some of us are grieving with no usual ways for comfort.

We long for a touch from you. Not just some metaphor.
We long for actual touch.
We want to love you with heart and soul and mind and strength.
We want to love our neighbors.
We really do.

But we are weary in every way we can be.

God, I ask for protection of relationships and bodies.

I ask for creativity and compassion.
I ask for healing and health.
I ask for conversations that surprise us with tenderness, that restore us with laughter, that humble us with generosity, that heal us with compassion.
I ask for a willingness to abandon the drive for understanding and for lessons to teach and to embrace a settled commitment to love now, you and others.

May we find rest for our bodies and minds and hearts and souls in your love, today and always.

Through Christ our Lord,

Amen.

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It’s spring break in the schools around us. That’s a good time for a prayer for rest, written during Lent in 2020. Published in God. We Still Need You. A Year of Pandemic Prayer and Practice from a Hospital Chaplain.