Annual Meeting of Central Atlanta Progress

I bring you greetings from the heart of Downtown -- Central Presbyterian Church.  Over the Valentine’s Day Weekend, we celebrated our 150th anniversary.  I am privileged to serve as pastor of one of the only churches I know that has two canons pointed at it from across Washington Street on the lawn of the State Capitol.  We are a congregation of believers committed to the belief that all children in this city are children of God no matter their age, no matter if they sleep in luxury or sleep on our streets.  We are committed to keeping the city, the state, and businesses aware of their responsibilities to create adequate housing, employment opportunities, education, and hope so that homelessness and poverty are not accepted as normative and prison not a first option for those struggling with hunger and mental illness.

I come today praying for progress not only for our businesses and schools and religious organizations, but progress in opening our hearts to all God’s children who walk the streets of our cherished city. 

Let us pray:

We pray for children in our city who sneak cookies before supper, who can never find their shoes; And we pray for those who can’t bound down the street in a new pair of sneakers, who were born in parts of this city we wouldn’t be caught dead, who live in an X-rated world.

We pray for children in our city who bring us fistfuls of dandelions, who forget their lunch money; and we pray for those who never get dessert, who don’t have any rooms to clean up, whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser, and whose monsters are real.

We pray for children who throw tantrums in grocery stores, who shove dirty clothes under the bed, who squirm in church or temple or mosque and whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry; and we pray for those whose nightmares come in the daytime, who aren’t spoiled by anybody, who go to bed hungry, who live and move, but have no being.

We pray for the children of our city we never give up on and for those who don’t get a second chance.  We pray that you will not only bless the food that we will receive today, but that you will teach us that progress happens when no child of this city is too invisible to be seen and too much trouble to be loved. 

Hear our prayers, O One who loves this city and every child in it.

AMEN

(thanks to Ina Hughes for the inspiration for this prayer)