A prayer for Haiti

We lit a candle and prayed for Haiti tonight at church. I borrowed some words a friend had written on their blog.

How do you pray in all this? The question isn't so much where is God as where are we and where is help for our world, and what will help anyway? Money will. So we give it, then double it. Long term compassion will, because money and relief aid will be needed for years. Questions will - especially those about the unfair distribution of wealth across our world, and why it is that poor people, in a high risk area, whose homes are cheaply built and collapse easily, and who have no state sponsored medical service, are utterly vulnerable. And yes prayer will, especially prayer as Barth urged, the lifting up of holy hands against the status quo.

We will light a candle and pray for the people of Haiti. And that small flame, the candle self-consumed in the giving of light, will signifiy our calling to lighten the darkness, to radiate the life and light of Christ - by the strategic generosity of giving money - by long term commitment to go on giving into the future - by not settling for the rules of the global money-grubbing and resource-grabbing game - by praying against all that diminishes and crushes human hearts and bodies, and by doing so in the name of the One whose own body was crushed, and through whom life and hope and the love of the Eternal reaches the darkest recesses of our God-loved world.