We will pray for you. That’s at the heart of a letter (PDF) sent to church partners who find themselves in the midst of the current violence in Georgia and Russia by Gradye Parsons, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America.
Nancy Copeland-Payton wrote a prayer early in the crisis that could be adapted.
Dear God,
Your children in Georgia and Russia are fighting again. Troops wage war in the Georgian backyard of South Ossetia. The blood of brother, sister, father, mother is spilled.
Yet there are Georgian and Russian families in South Ossetia who yearn only for an honest day’s work, for bread on the table, for peace in which their children may grow safely into adults. It is all your earth, your creation entrusted to our stewardship that we parcel with our barbed wire borders and walls that divide.
We pray for peace for people in Georgia. We pray for the living together in love and justice of neighbors who are different. We pray for the sake of the children, that they may grow up hearing birdsong and rushing rivers rather than the sound of guns.
In Christ’s name,
Amen.