I wanted to share this prayer that Brian D. McLaren posted today via Twitter:

Today on this National Day of Prayer, I pray for the soul of America. Help us, Living God, to return to what the prophet Micah says matters most: doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with you.

Where we are arrogant, soften our hearts and help us rediscover true humility. Where we have slipped into falsehood, exaggeration, minimization, or lack of passion for truth, restore our desire to be faithful to reality and honest about facts, including inconvenient ones.

Where we respond to evil with evil or anger with anger or hate with hate, convict us of the folly of our ways, so that we will respond to evil with good, anger with healing, and hate with love.

When we turn toward cynicism or fall into despair, turn us back to the path of endurance, the path of peacemaking, the path of hope against hope. Help us to face the painful truths of our past, including those from which we have hidden our eyes.

Help us, in fighting the monster, never to become the monster. Liberate us from the spirit of reactivity, so that we may seek justice, joy, and peace in the power of your holy and nonviolent Spirit.

Deliver us from the vicious cycle of living outrage to outrage; help us break that cycle by creating and celebrating audacious and courageous acts of beauty, kindness, generosity, and justice.

And when we make mistakes and betray the ideals of our prayers, help us to humbly acknowledge our faults, receive your grace, and rededicate ourselves to the path of wisdom, so that our lives may set an example for our nation – that it is never too late for a new beginning.

Brian D. McLaren. Twitter posts, May 3, 2018, beginning at 10:54 a.m.,
http://bit.ly/2rhB6Q4.