What have you been bringing to God in prayer? What are the urgent and anxious thoughts on your heart and in your mind when you have been praying? God wants us to come freely to Him when we pray. In I Peter 5:7 we read, “Cast all your cares on Him, (God) for He cares for you.” Do we grasp the significance of this? God wants us to bring all of our cares to Him. Out of deep compassion, God really cares for us when we happy and contented and when we are hurting and troubled. God is already aware of our situations and wants us to trust Him to be with us and to help us. Sometimes we may feel that we will tire God with all of our needs. We are then considering things from how we might respond to constant need. God never gets tired of hearing from us because He loves us so much. When we struggle to put into words what we are feeling and what we need, God cares and has already acquainted Himself with our cares because He cares that much. Even before we choose to express to God how heavy a burden is that we are carrying, God knows. May we never hesitate to come to God with complete honesty and to receive the relief of turning everything over to the One who cares more for us than anyone else ever could. Today, August 5th in our Wednesday Prayer Together at 1 pm, we can gather up all of our cares and choose to bring them to our loving God who cares for us. We can pray for ourselves, for each other, and for our world. We can know with relief and certainty that God cares for us and for our world. Here is a prayer to pray together wherever we are:
Our God, often our prayers are filled with us telling You all that we are concerned over and all the ways that we need You to change things and to bring answers. We are thankful that You welcome us casting all of our cares on You. We have learned and continue to discover how much You care for us. We want to begin this time of prayer by focusing on how You do care for us and how Your care for us has been a reality. We thank You for the depth of Your care for us and for our world. Knowing that You care for us, gives us confidence that we can bring anything and everything to You. We thank You for consistent reminders and demonstrations of Your care. We thank You for the ways You have been bringing answers to our prayers. We thank You for the ways You have been inspiring us to care as You care and to be willing and available to serve You as we care and make ourselves available. In these moments, we cast on You the pressing care of when we will see this corona virus brought under control and when we can feel safe again. We and people around us feel weary from all the considerations we need to follow around being safe and ensuring that others are safe. We cast on You the restrictions that still prevent close associations with people that we care about and want to embrace. We cast on You the burden of not feeling secure and declare that we want to trust You to be our security. We cast on You the economic cares that we do not yet fully know and cannot fully anticipate. We think of all those whose lives and means of making a living have been drastically changed. We cast on you the care of the older individuals who feel lonely and vulnerable. We cast on You the burden of the younger ones who still want to hope and dream and find themselves wondering if that is possible in the chaos of our world. We cast on You those who feel responsible to provide care for others when they are also needing care. We cast on You prayers that we have been praying for a long time and those we have been praying recently. We cast on You the need for physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional healing. We cast on You the anguish of being overwhelmed by cares that we cannot manage and admit that we don’t know what to do with them. We pray for people we know and people that we do not know. We ask that all of us who come to you as Our God who cares will experience Your care in fresh ways. We ask that we will find fresh ways to express Your care. We do not want anyone to face today feeling that no one cares for them. As we receive Your care loving God, we want to extend Your care. Please guide and lead us in caring for those who need to receive care. Certain that You do care for us, we come to You with every care and surrender them all to You in the Name of Jesus, AMEN.