Prayers to Prepare Your Heart for an Election: Peacemaking
Why should battle be the norm? Why does combat get to frame our interactions?
David Taylor, citing an ancient prayer, refers to God as a lover of concord. In a synonymous way, the prayer also describes God as a lover of peace. Concord suggests harmony and peaceful agreement between people and groups.
These qualities of God’s being seem quite far from being lived out this election season. Most of our world, and certainly America, is full of political tempest. Our storm drops violent language akin to softball-sized hail. It contains hurricane-strength winds of mutual destruction of neighbors who too easily become enemies.
Harmony, unity, and friendship seem like weak words, unfit for our moment of battle. But why should battle be the norm? Why does combat get to frame our interactions? What if violence is unsuitable for human relations? Consider that God is a lover of peace, and that Jesus brought God-light to the world. In light of Jesus, which one makes the most sense: fighting or facilitating concord?Â
Today’s prayer suggests a powerful truth: God’s providential care is the source from which two important realities emerge.
We are protected from the tempest.
That protection is the basis by which we are freed from fear and given the potential to be peacemakers. Not peacekeepers, which too often gets confused with keeping the status quo. Peacekeeping is not helpful to those being harmed by broken social and economic systems.
When we are secure in God’s providential care, and when we are seeking the formation of our soul into God’s kind of concord, we then have the potential to be the peacemakers that Jesus celebrates.
Read the prayer below just to get a feel for its language and for the condition of heart it represents.
Then pray it. Ask God to intervene with his providential care in the situation that is most on your heart today regarding the tempest of this election season.
 Lastly, pray it again, asking God to give you an imagination for being a maker of peace today with someone in your everyday, ordinary life.
O Lord, you who are the lover of concord, help us, we pray, not to become needlessly anxious over the political tempests that rage across the landscape of our land but rather to trust in your providential care, so that we might remain peacemakers to friend and stranger alike this day. We pray this in the name of Jesus, who holds all things together.
Amen.
In the next turbulent weeks, be at peace as you enact peacemaking.