A Prayer for Heavy Times

I flew to Orlando two days after the shooting at Pulse Nightclub, and two days before the little boy was killed by an alligator at a Disney resort. It felt heavy, all of it, and I found myself writing a prayer. I thought about sharing it at the time, and it just didn't feel right yet.

Now there is the bombing in Baghdad and the shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. And other things too, so that scrolling down my news feed this morning, it all just felt really heavy. And I went back to that prayer and prayed it again.

I share it not because I'm awesome at writing prayers, but because sometimes praying other people's words can be really meaningful to me, and I wanted to put this one out there for others who feel the heaviness of all this.

A couple of notes on the process of writing this prayer:
I've been practicing understanding God in different ways, stepping outside the images of God as father or God as king (while those images are certainly true and found in many places in Scripture, they are not the only meaningful ones). Lately I have been praying to Jesus as my Brother, which is both beautiful and strangely intimate.
Also, I drew heavily from Psalm 123 for this prayer.

A Prayer for Orlando (and Other Heavy Times)

Brother Jesus, we are spent with grief. Brother, we are broken. We are an open wound. Have mercy, Brother, have mercy; for we have had more than enough contempt. We have had more than enough scorn and more than enough hatred and more than enough fear. Be gracious to us. In your great mercy, show yourself kind.
Amen.