As you know, every Sunday I share here the prayer that I will be praying in the hospital chapel that day. These prayers reflect the Bible passages that are part of the service for that day. The passages are from the Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year cycle of readings.

Often, I use the prayer I wrote three years before, after reviewing it to make sure it still makes sense.

I’m comfortable with “reusing” these written and spoken statements to God. There is precedent from the Psalms, where songs and prayers were used regularly, written down, and then shared for millennia since. And written prayers in the history of the church.

And, the reason I started writing these Sunday prayers was because I found myself repeating myself. I would show up to chapel, having been with families in traumas or deaths. I would say the same things to God, not having energy enough to think through what we might all need to express.

(I gathered a couple years of those prayers in God. We Need You and God. We Still Need You.)

What prompted me to talk about this today, is that yesterday’s prayer, for the fourth Sunday of Easter, was written the week of April 25, 2021. We were a year into the pandemic at that point, and there were very many arguments about who to believe, about what to do. It was becoming almost impossible to make a statement about healthcare (and many other things) without that statement being treated as a declaration of sides, of right and wrong.

As I read the prayer again before deciding whether to use it again, I realized that in the last three years, the situation has not improved. It feels as if God did not pay any attention to my request:

God, even today, even here in a hospital, you are inviting us to accept your shepherding, your healing for our minds and hearts, your presence in our long loneliness, your acceptance in our shame, your peace in our fear.

You are inviting us. Please help us accept your invitation.

And so I said the words again yesterday, in a chapel in a hospital in northeast Indiana.

Hear our prayer, O Lord.