O God, you have loved each of us since before we were born, and you love each of us in equal and abundant measure. Yet we sometimes chose not to see ourselves in one another. We sometimes choose to live as though we were not the brothers and sisters we know ourselves to be. Pour your blessing upon all your people in every nation especially for the women and children in areas of unrest and violence, for whom we pray today, whatever their faith or ethnicity. Preserve their lives, deliver them from the terror of war, and, when this is over, guide them in the way of reconciliation and peace.
Bring them a deepening sense of their oneness in the human family, that those things that unite your people may be seen and felt as greater than anything that can ever decide us.
Amen.
-The Reverend Barbara Cawthorne Crafton Women’s Uncommon Prayers: Our Lives Revealed, Nurtured, Celebrated edited by Elizabeth Rankin Geitz, Ann Smith, Marjorie A. Burke Morehouse Publishing, 2000