The news and images coming out of Egypt are unmistakably ominous. Political forces are being unleashed that are near impossible to control and are impossible to predict. And when such a powerful player in the Arab world is destabilised the entire region becomes vulnerable. Israel's southern border is less secure, the populations of other autocratic Arab States watch closely, and the world becomes anxious as the major oil source of the Middle East is thrown into unceretainty.
But for me its the people who show us what's at stake. Faces anxious, angry, pleading for support; faces bruised and bleeding, voices crying out their aspirations for freedom, their hunger for a more just society, and whose demand for more influence through democratic processes and structures will not be easily or cheaply silenced. And which have already ended in death.
So today I pray for the kind of peace which is not the capitulation of peoples hopes to violent forces and the manipulative ugliness of a dying regime. When the nations are in tumult prayer can too easily become an asking of God to bless my amateur political solutions and act within the tiny paramaters of any wisdom I might conceivably have. I don't know how this will all end – but the God of peace who brought again the Lord Jesus from the dead is the God I believe is on the side of life, freedom, peace and reconciliation. How that might happen I don't know. So my prayers become an imaginative identification with other human beings' demands for righteousness and justice to flow, instead of tanks rolling. My prayer is that the military presence will remain a barrier to the uncontained violence that might erupt, and that the presence of tanks and guns will provide the kind of restraint that allows a just peacemaking to happen.
Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer.
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