A Prayer for Georgia

God, I'm praying this morning for this place to which you delivered me, now 9 months ago. This strange place--Atlanta. Georgia. Parochial and cosmopolitan, whiter than I'm used to, and also darker than I'm used to. Urban-ish, and very rural if you're willing to drive a short distance beyond "the perimeter." A place divided by color, burned in an apocalyptic war, pieced back together by dreams of unity and grandiosity, dreams watered generously by a syrupy, brown cola. God, thank you for this peculiar and often lovely place.

God, thank you for the rains of this week. It is cool today and the ground held some water. Thank you (it's been so damn hot)! Help to replenish this patch of earth, God. I hope the waters that you poured on the North Georgia mountains fill the streams and tributaries, gather into the rivers and lift the levels of our thirsty reservoirs. God, please send more rain. Nourish the fields and farms across this state; grow up the crops for the harvest so that this red clay earth can feed its citizens--every one of them--and the revenue can feed the life of small towns across this state.

God, send strength to the workers here. Make every day of work an act of praise. God, help the businesses in this state do well by doing good things for people. Help us to make carpets and tools and airplanes; make sound loans and investments; heal bodies, build roads and buildings, and teach children.

God help our politicians. Give them energy and intelligence, imagination and love. Help them to help us (not themselves). Give them the wisdom to see new immigrants to our state as a blessing (not the curse they are made out to be); to see them as your gift of energy and hope to us. Help our politicians to invest long-term in schools and teachers, not prisons and guards. God help our politicians to tax us well--to ask for sacrifice where sacrifice is warranted, to offer relief where relief is needed. Help them to work for our future (and by this I mean a future that is farther out than the next election cycle).

God, inspire our many, many preachers... and our imams and our rabbis (they're here, too, caring for your children). Give them words to speak this weekend that bind up wounds. Grant them a powerful vision of peace among your children. Give them words to speak that will paint beautiful pictures of the future in the mind's eye of their congregants--pictures that include loving depictions one another.

God, thank you for bringing me to this place. Atlanta. Georgia. Make me a blessing to this place, as it is a blessing to me. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.