Prayer for the Day

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Prayer for the Day: 13/01/2022

13/01/2022

BBC Radio 4 - Prayer for the Day, 13/01/2022

Radio 4's daily prayer and reflection. Producer: Seamus Boyd

SCRIPT

Good morning. 

Today in 1943 Adolf Hitler, after serious reverses on the Eastern Front, demanded total war on the allies. He called for a fresh effort from the German people. 500,000 men were brought into the German armed forces by replacing male factory workers with women. 

By 1943 war was, of course, well underway.  Yet even before its outbreak in 1939 persecution of the Jewish people had begun. In 1938 Kristallnacht, when 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken to camps, had sealed the Nazi commitment to destroy the Jewish people. By the end of the war some 6 million Jews had been dehumanised, obliterated by genocide. Sadly the Shoah, the Holocaust which is perhaps the most well known of all genocides, was not the only effort to destroy a people or nation. 

The impact of such events as genocide and war are far reaching. In this day and time we know more about trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder yet we remain ill equipped to support nations to recover and experience post-traumatic growth. We are in the throes of a pandemic that will leave its mark on individual lives and across the peoples of the world. This is a time to fervently work and pray for the resources and tools to support the kind of recovery that allow growth. 

Lord God, we pray for the kind of recovery that unites people and shares resources for a just and fair world. Amen.

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