Prayer: Sexual Violence Awareness Week

This was a prayer I wrote for the Dean to read on the closing night of Sexual Violence Awareness Week 2016. We were standing in a grassy square, surrounded by small plastic pinwheels. One pinwheel was placed for each current female Biola student who (if national statistics held true) had likely been sexually assaulted.

There were hundreds of pinwheels...

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Father God… The pinwheels make our eyes burn. 

To know that each is a soul

Created by You; Your image incarnate;

A sister, a lover, a friend… maybe one of those pinwheels is mine.

We hate that there have to be pinwheels.

But we confess that we are the thing we hate.

We use each other for our own ends.

I take what I want;

I am broken, and I break others in the process.

Oh God, heal.

And Father, some of us here have been wounded;

Wounded by strangers we never knew,

Wounded by strangers we loved and trusted

so deeply, so cruelly,

that we believe we will never heal. Part of us is cold, dead, lost.

But you are the God who brings dead things to life, 

who brings lost things home.

And if to ‘survive’ means ‘to live above and beyond’

then, even as pinwheels spin when the wind moves, 

we pray that your Spirit would move 

in the hearts of these survivors, 

and restore their joy, their hope, their life. 

So this is not a graveyard we stand by tonight.

More like a crucifix necklace or a rosary

it is a way of remembering not just what has happened

but what is still to come.

Father, help us to love one another.

Not a love that takes, but a love that gives.

A love that serves, not a love that enslaves.

Not a love well-meaning yet silent,

But a love that protects, defends, speaks, as You spoke:

“A new commandment I give to you, 

that you love one another.

Just as I have loved you, 

you also are to love one another. 

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, 

if you have love for one another.”

Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

Amen.