This prayer was submitted by a friend of the Cornwall Alliance.

Heavenly Father, we praise you first of all for your work of redemption — for delivering us from the punishment that we deserve for our self-centeredness and for our failure to consistently translate your concern for the poor into action.  

We thank you Father for giving us forgiveness as a free gift, for we could never earn it.  And as we look at your creation, we thank you that you have also given us the use of your creation as a free gift — for we could never earn that blessing either.  

We praise you that you have not given us a fragile world that we could destroy, but that you have made your creation resilient, self-repairing, and able to recover even from events like the flood of Noah’s day.

We thank you also that you have not left us alone to control the awesome forces of nature that show your power so clearly, but that you have appointed boundaries for the seas, have built self-repairing mechanisms into our world and have fine-tuned your creation for your glory and to meet the needs of your creatures, including ourselves.  

May the wonders of the environment that you created for us, become a cause of renewed praise to you.

We thank you that climate variations are nothing new, but are part of what you created for us, and that we don’t need to fear them.  We pray that you would give us greater skill in adapting to climate variations rather than trying to prevent them.

Grant us your wisdom and help us to see what will be the most effective ways of helping the poor to achieve the widespread blessings that you give to the just and the unjust alike.

We thank you for all the blessings you have made available to us through technical and economic development, especially in recent centuries. May we, who have received so much from your hand, be faithful in helping the poor to achieve the same benefits, that they too might be able to meet their most basic needs, and after that, to also be concerned to beautify and protect the environment.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash.