Dear Friends,

 We hope that you are safe and well.

 Today's Meditation gives voice to the Prayer for Peace in our hearts. Afghanistan and Haiti weigh heavy on our hearts and we beam out caring energy to fortify the people there who are undergoing so much.

We invite you to join us as we commit ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in the church, in healthcare, in the workplace--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.

In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that it is God's economy of abundance: when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.

We hope and pray that you find peace, healing, hope and the infusion of joy in your life!

With our love and care,

Ron and Jean

MEDITATION 441: Ploughshares Prayer for Peace

Dear God, we hear of peace only as a faraway dream;

we long for it in our lives and our countries.

But with each passing day

the prospect for peace

seems to be increasingly tantalizing.

Restlessness seems to be

the order of our present existence:

our inner restlessness rooted in various anxieties,

our societal restlessness rooted in

the evils that go on around us,

the restlessness of our world

plagued by conflicts of all sorts.

Dear God, we hear of peace only as a dream;

a dream we would love to be part of,

a dream we long to have in our hearts, in our neighborhoods,

in our countries, and even in our churches.

We pray that we may experience that peace

that passes all understanding,

we pray, O God, that we may experience You,

the Peace of the world.

Penetrate the grieving heart,

accompany the lonely one,

remember the forgotten,

reclaim the strayed,

make music out of the

disharmony of conflict and chaos.

Let our restless hearts rest in you, O God.

This we pray in the name of the One

who beckons us into the vision of Peace. Amen.

~ written by David Tonghou Ngong

Ploughshares