09/09/2022
Memphis is our home. I will continue to shine the light in the darkness and be an example of hope for the future. I will continue to fight for this community and continue spreading God’s unconditional love in downtown, midtown, Frayser, Nutbush, Cordova, Southaven, Germantown, Bartlett, and all of the villages in between.
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Prayer for Our Cities
Loving God, you have set us in families and clans, in cities and neighborhoods.
Our common life began in a garden, but our destiny lies in the city.
You have placed us in Memphis. This is our home.
Your creativity is on display here through the work of human hearts and hands.
We pray for Memphis today—for North, South, and East Memphis, for Orange Mound and Cooper Young, for Berclair and Central Gardens, Frayser and Evergreen and Raleigh.
We pray for our poorest neighbors and for powerful people in banks and offices downtown.
We pray for people from the ’hood and for the new urbanites.
We pray for Memphis’s sisters: Germantown, and Bartlett, and West Memphis, and Millington, and Olive Branch, and Southaven, and others.
And for Nashville and Jackson, Jerusalem and Nairobi, Shanghai and Port-au-Prince—and a thousand other cities connected to our own.
In all our neighborhoods this day there will be crime and callous moneymaking; there will be powerful people unable or unwilling to see the vulnerable who are their neighbors.
There will also be beautiful acts of compassion and creativity in all these places—forgiveness and generosity; neighbors working together for a more just community.
Help us see this place as something other than a battleground between us and them, where our imaginations are limited by win/lose propositions and endless rivalry.
Show us a deeper reality, God: Show us your playground, and invite us to play.
Like the city of your dreams, make this a city where those who were once poor enjoy the fruits of their labor;
A place where children are no longer doomed to misfortune, but play safely in the streets under the watchful eyes of healthy old men and women;
A place where former rivals and natural enemies work and play together in peace;
And where all people enjoy communion with you. We pray in the name of the one who wept over the city. Amen.
Adapted from Walter Brueggemann
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