Prayer for Deliverance

Prayer for a Pandemic
12/11/20

Oh Lord, deliver me from my latest piece of writing for I tire of pushing words around. Deliver me from the pain in my leg that keeps me from waking rested. May you take away the persistent itch in the middle of my back and, if it is a larval parasite from Belize, may you cause it to erupt from my skin and fledge.

Would that you could also heal my friends and neighbors from their small maladies and depressions, that you could (if you would, Lord) grant hope to the hopeless and restore short-term memory to the forgetful.

Oh powerful, all-knowing fixer, will you please rein in your human experiment, or at least cause their weapons to disintegrate and their vitriolic words to dissolve behind their lips unsaid. Please find a way to disable social media algorithms so that the other half will begin wearing masks. And while you’re in there, Lord, can you muck up online shopping for a week or two to give the planet a rest?

Please do what you can, Lord, to put the brakes on Big Ag, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Oil even if you must do it in the guise of a massive solar flare or meteorite. I can’t take much more war and planetary disruption Lord, and if you don’t mind my saying, your beloved humans have gone too far.

May you deliver us from the sixth extinction and restore Earth’s right to biodiversity. May you cause the bulldozers harm so that small pockets of animals might breathe and expand, so that the rains may resume in the deserts, the polar ice refreeze, and the flooding recede unless this is only the beginning of another great flood, in which case please carry on because, of course, you have always had this.

And Lord, if it’s not too much to ask, please remove the last eight months of growth from my hair as it has grown so long that it is getting trapped in my armpit when I try to sleep.

Amen