A Prayer for Election Day

Post Author: Sara Gross Samuelson

While Young Clergy Women International serves clergy women across the globe, the author offers up this Prayer for Election Day on U.S. Election Day, but hopes it might be used equally across our membership and readership.

Even as we speak the words
“A Prayer for Election day”
We find in our guts
the traces of humanity:
in suspicion
in wondering
what kind of prayer this might be.

For what are we asking of you,
Divine One who gave us voice
And thought
And will

What shall our petitions be
On this day we deem to set aside
For democracy
For exercising each of our own
Civically gifted political authority

And yet, still, we have need of you
Of your Wisdom and your Word.
In spite of and because of
This worldly yet holy belief in our collective voice
For it is exactly that divisiveness our suspicion breeds
That we seek to heal and make whole

So we come to You,
God of a power that is beyond our understanding.
With these prayers for our day of voice and vote.

For all those who vote, for their diverse voice and conviction, and for our collective discernment as national community.

We pray to You.

For the casting of ballots, may they become our voice of your creation, calling out the promise of your Love and Justice.

We pray to You.

For candidates and ballot measures and all those who work to share their message

We pray to You.

For our thoughtful considerations, debates, discussion and research

We pray to You.

For just access to ballots

We pray to You.

For volunteers and election workers and their equitable exercise of stewarding the election

We pray to You.

For what seems to us the inevitable tragedy of voter discrimination

We pray to You.

For the waiting and the watching, for our doubts and our dreams

We pray to You.

For all those who will be elected this day and for all those who currently hold public office, that their work might be enlivened by Spirit’s stirring toward our common humanity.

We pray to You.

And for the courage in the days to come to continue to seek and speak our values that are rooted in Your Love and Promise,

We pray to You, O God of Love
Who gives us voice
Who convicts our thoughts
And who calls us to lives of justice, peace, and reconciliation.

Rev. Sara Gross Samuelson is ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and is currently on leave from call. She and her husband Josh live in Milwaukie, Oregon, with their dog, Copper, and two-month-old son, Wendel.

Sara has a long history working in outdoor ministry, has memorized unseemly chunks of dialogue from Aaron Sorkin’s productions, is openly prideful of the Pacific Northwest and its outdoor wonderlands, and has a complicated relationship with her book-buying habits.

Image by: Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash
Used with permission