Dear LORD,

For eons of time you have been calling to your children to pay attention
To Your precepts.  You have commanded our respect and reverence
For Your deity, Your power, Your wisdom, but more importantly,
Your agape love for every created soul.

And LORD, for generation after generation, we have ignored You.
We have turned to our own way.

Now, when an unseen and seemingly unconquerable enemy
Confronts our lifestyle, we scramble to remediate our life choices.
We search in the annals of man for answers.  We bring in the most renown of human experts.
We arm our soldiers and our medical personnel with shields and masks in an anemic attempt to
Preclude death.

We call out to others from behind a window and say, “Be well.”
We remember Psalm 2: “Why are the nations in an uproar
And the peoples devising a vain thing? … He who sits in the heavens laughs, The Lord scoffs at them.”  Help us, LORD, to seek You as the essence of our being.

LORD, when …

Our worship of You is ritualistic;
We hurry on to self-fulfilling activities in the times we should seek You;
We care more about ourselves than our neighbors;
We work more for the benefit of ourselves than for those we are assigned to care for;
We play and put-off Your prescribed work;
We sleep and close our ears to the cries of innocent babies from the womb;
We party when so many have nothing to eat;
We ignore the call to duty except when we will receive the credit;
We care more about the adequacy of our bank account than Your sovereignty over everything;
We choose our own time and situation to perform our peripheral acts of kindness and help;
We are ignorant of Your call because we failed to listen to You and seek Your guidance.

LORD, show us our sin. Be specific.

Hebrews 12:7 -11 says:

“It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons, for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?  But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.  Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness.  All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” (NASB)

Our prayer is this, LORD, help us to use this pandemic
To re-prioritize our values and realign them with Your Word
So that we may truly represent You and the salvation You bought for the world.

We come with this request
In the name of Jesus Christ our Savior.

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This prayer was submitted by CWA of Texas State Director Ann Hettinger. Click here for more prayers from our “30 Days of Prayer in the Midst of Covid-19” effort. Here for more coronavirus-related resources.