I began writing Collect Prayers the second week of March 2020, around the time that the CDC recommended that no more than 50 people gather at a time on account of the coronavirus. At the time, I wrote these prayers in response to specific requests, from both personal friends and strangers on social media, who asked for words that might help them to cope with their fears and to make sense of the senseless.
I didn’t imagine that I would keep writing prayers, but new things kept happening that demanded new prayers: a prayer for grocers managing panic-buying shoppers; a prayer for medical professionals overwhelmed by the countless sick; a prayer for anxious children at bedtime.
I also wrote a Prayer for Dashed Plans, a Prayer for Driving to Work, a Prayer for Feeling Stressed Out, a Prayer for Untimely Deaths, a Prayer for Geographically Separated Worship and a Prayer for the Pestilence that Stalks in the Dark.
I even wrote a Prayer for a Neighbor Behaving Like an Idiot, because I figured we all had a neighbor who fit that description, wherever we may live or whatever our political persuasion.
Phaedra and I once again partnered to create a new set of prayer cards (the Psalms Prayer Cards being our first collaboration). Phaedra has contributed a series of original tide-pool watercolor paintings for one side of the card, while I’ve contributed the text for the other side. The prayers include such things as a morning prayer and an evening prayer, a work prayer and a healing prayer, a prayer for the alone and for frustrated relationships, along with prayers for justice, service, community, and mission.
Our supremely talented friend Shaun Fox designed the cards and the Rabbit Room has again kindly offered to print and distribute them.
Our hope, in the end, is that these prayers might be placed on your refrigerator or bathroom mirror or bedside table or car console as a way to become helpful to you in whatever circumstance of life you may find yourself in and to enable you to feel that God is present to you in these circumstances.