God of all children
God of all the refugee and immigrant children
God of my children
I pray today to thank you for my kids: Libby, Cici and Ike. I pray they continue to be the joy they have been. They have beautiful hearts, they have conscious minds, they care for others, they listen, they thrive to be good human beings. Surely, they can also be a handful sometimes but I am so grateful to you for them. They make me feel like a father and that is all I want to be in this life!
I thank you for Peter, their father, such a precious man with a wonderful heart. I am grateful the kids can have a daddy in heaven and dad on earth, both of us striving to give our best to the kids.
I also thank you for my father, my Waldemar, who loved me so much and made me who I am. I thank you for his always present Buddha smile, his creativity and his preciousness.
God of all children, I call upon you today to care for all of the children in risk of losing their lives. The world is so much inflicted with pain that we come to you to help us deal with it and not despair. If our hope in you is not easy, our hope for change is barely existent. We cling on to you as we cling to each other to find sustenance and a way out.
God of all the refugee and immigrant children,
Today I pray for the children of the refugees and the children of the immigrants and the miserable life they are living right now, always at the edge of losing all. They live in horrid situations and their parents have no choice but to leave. And these kids, Oh God, they don’t have the body, the heart and the soul to go through it all. They depend on their parents and their parents become 3, 5, 10 people just to make sure they can survive. They go through deep waters, high mountains and deserts in order to find some solace, some sort of shape and form of a shelter for their children. But they fight countless armies of carelessness, of lack of bare minimum empathy, of cold love and they don’t have the strength to keep going for too long
Most of them are right now in the midst of hunger, coldness, abandonment and death. They area debris of wars that are orchestrated by some politicians, they are the leftovers of financial interests, they are the excesses of the world population, the contingencies of mistakes, the casualties of the processes of “peace.”
They live in absurd situations, situations to makes us deaf!
But these kids, oh God, they are amazing! As giants, they fight the fight, they hang in there in situations of horror, they stand tall and they change situations and systems. We praise you for the kids who fought the civil rights in US and strengthened the fight! We give you glory for the kids in US now fighting for the control of guns. We sing you alleluia for all the kids who take care of their siblings when their fathers go absent and their mothers have to take three jobs to bring food to the table. Like my mother who lost her mother when she was nine and had to care for her 5-year-old bother and her 3-year-old sister.
God of all children, the refugees and immigrant children are the suffering children of our time! They are just kids and they can’t go through it all. We the adults must be a fence for their safety!
God of all children, the refugees and immigrant children,
I wonder if you don’t you look at their faces? Because when we do we see desperation, frail traces of screams they can’t even scream because they don’t have the anima to speak anymore. Their strength has been taken away, their souls pressed down, de-pressed, and all the air of life was robbed from them.
God of all children, the refugees and immigrant children,
I wonder if you don’t hear their cries. Because it is lancinating, it is heart wrenching, it is maddening, it feels it goes beyond the limits of any human suffering, of any brutality caused by any other human being. Their salty tears fall on the ground and nobody picks it up. There are way too many Bathshebas and Naomi losing their children right now. Too many women turning their names into Mara, “for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.”
God of all children, the refugees and immigrant children,
Help me I pray!
Help me!
Help me to teach my kids to care for the least of these, always!
Help me to teach my kids to care deeply for immigrants and refugees.
Help me to teach open their houses to receive them.
Help me to teach them to develop a compassionate heart for them.
Help me to teach them to disobey unjust laws and strive to create laws that hold up the dignity and honor of every single human beings.
Help me to teach them that before governments and any law come those in need. Help me teach them what the apostle Paul said: “whatever other commands there may be, are summed up in this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.”
Help me to teach them that these kids are their brothers and sisters just as they are my kids.
Help me to teach them to give their possessions away, to give their money to those in need, so they can learn to live with just enough.
May my teaching never be only words but actions, a life given to the poor even if I fall short every single day.
Help me to pray with them every night!
Help me to pray with them for the immigrant and refugee children every night.
Help me to pray with them so their hearts can always be in the right place.
Help me to pray with them so their ideas and emotions stay always with the poor.
Help me to pray with them as Jacques Derrida prayed once: “the world is gone, and I must carry you.”
God of all children, I pray Jesus to be a fence!
Jesus be a fence all around these refugee and immigrant kids everyday
Jesus I want you to protect them as they travel along the way,
As they are locked in borders,
As they are lost in the desert or roads they don’t know where they will end up.
As they are attacked by nation-states and robbers.
As they go hungry and despair looms large around them.
As they are caught by the brutality of Border Patrols and have them ripped apart from their parents.
Oh Jesus be a fence
I pray
Oh Jesus be a fence
Oh Jesus be a fence
Oh Jesus
Oh Jesus
Cláudio Carvalhaes, June 17, 2018