A Prayer for Africa
Offered by Rebecca Sharpless in morning worship,
Sunday, August 31, 2003

Our God, More than three million years ago, in East Africa, your people stood upright for the first time. As those first humans, our foremothers and forefathers, stretched upward and found their balance, you saw that it was good. So from Africa we all have come, spread throughout the world. This vast and beautiful continent is the ancestral home of all of us.

But all is not well with our parent land. The wind blows and the heat builds, and the sand spreads. Trees fall and are hauled away so that people in the cities can have fuel to boil their laundry water and cook their suppers. 

Our parent land needs water, God. Across most of its expanse, it needs rain to beat back the dryness of the great Kalahari and Sahara. Because there is no rain, there is little food. Crops dry up, and herds weaken and die. Your people move, searching for a way to provide for their families. The old and the young, the enfeebled, perish by the thousands each day for want of food and water.

Our parent land needs wisdom, God. Many caring and devoted workers try every day to improve life in Africa, from the Sahel to the Sudan. Give them strength and patience to continue their efforts. Guide them to make decisions which will work. As we here at Lake Shore try to discern what our relationship to Africa will be in the near future, please show us what we, in this very room, can do that will most make a difference. At the least, open our hearts to the needs of our parent land, so that when Christiana and Robert are close in spirit but far away in body, we will know and care about them and the work that they are trying to do.

God, if ever there were a land that needs justice to roll down like water, it is Africa. Send your righteousness to Africa like an everflowing stream. Help us here to be your agents of justice and righteousness, in ways however large or small.

Amen.