Want to say a prayer while getting the vaccine?
Local clergy members offer suggested words of thanks and praise .
When Bobbie Brunk got a call from her daughter about an appointment for the coronavirus vaccine, she immediately began to pray.
“It wasn’t a formal prayer,” says the Dayton woman. “My prayer was for God’s guidance that he would give me direction, that everything would go smoothly, that I would not have side effects, that everything would work out.”
Brunk is not alone. When the day finally comes that we receive our first vaccine, emotions are likely to run high. There may be tears of joy, gratitude, relief. And often a prayer.
“Prayer plays a very big role in my spiritual life and in the spiritual life of the congregation,” says the Rev. Michelle Wilkey of David’s United Church of Christ in Kettering. During the pandemic, she often has been called upon to offer up personal prayers for individuals as they are dealing with the virus in one way or another.
Now, with the vaccine rollout underway, Wilkey anticipates members may be asking for prayer before they receive the inoculation. “We would be more than willing to pray with them and
for them,” she says. Although the words can vary, there is a consistent theme: God is with us in all the moments of our lives. God is present in the good times and in the bad times.
“For many people this is the foundation of their faith and it helps them to get through these days knowing that they aren’t alone,” Wilkey says. A passage of scripture she recommends is Psalm 23, which is a reminder that God walks with us through all the days of our life.
A pair of original prayers
Barb Saylor, pastor of Beavercreek Church of the Brethren, has written this prayer:
God of love and hope, we are thankful for healing and wholeness.
After months of anxiety and sorrow and isolation because of COVID-19,
we are truly grateful for a vaccine that offers us respite and peace.
As vessels of your love and grace, open our bodies to immunity and your healing light.
And help us to continue to make wise choices, not only for ourselves, but for those whom we encounter. Be with the healers who are working medically to care for those suffering from this virus,
and who are doing all they can to make this vaccine available to everyone.
We lift all of this in the name of the one who taught us to love. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. P.E. Henderson Jr. of Corinthian Baptist Church has written this original prayer:
Almighty God we raise our hearts to you in praise and thanksgiving.
We thank you for the gift of medical knowledge, medical personnel, biotech companies and all governmental agencies who are working together to combat the coronavirus.
We thank you for the vaccines. We pray the vaccines will be made available to all. We pray for those who are sick, for those who grieve the loss of loved ones and for those whose physical, mental and economic well-being have been severely impacted by the pandemic.
Hear our prayer, oh God, in the name of Jesus , ground of our hope and strength. Amen.
reading everything about the wild outdoors that she could get her hands on, although she sensed that something important was lacking.
Nezhukumatathil said when she would read a book about nature that she particularly loved, there was a happy anticipation to find out who was the writer behind the beautiful descriptions, to “see who was her best friend.” To her disappointment, the books were routinely authored by older, white writers — never representative of Asian American women like Nezhukumatathil.
Pop culture of the 1980s and ’90s showed Nezhukumatathil that Asian American characters in music, books or television often played the main part in some spy operation, or more often, were the butts of poorly done jokes.
The expectation, Nezhukumatathil said, was to stay
in her lane, digest those stereotypes, study pre-medicine or something else in the field, and leave writing about the outdoors to somebody else.
“The truth of it is, in about 2015 (or) 2016, even though my degree is in nonfiction and poetry, the stuff I wanted to write about was the outdoors. I didn’t want to be contained in a verse or in a line break,” Nezhukumatathil said. “I needed my sentences to go margin to margin. I realized, ‘Oh, these are essays.’ They’re still short essays, but I just couldn’t stay silent anymore about not joining the conversation about the outdoors, and writing about what I love, which are different weird animals and plants.”
Now a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi, Nezhukumatathil called Beavercreek home only for her junior and senior years of high school, as her mother’s career as a psychiatrist kept the family on the move.
Although her time in the
Dayton area was brief, Nezhukumatathil said one Beavercreek High School teacher in particular was instrumental in what would be her future career as an author and professor: Becky (Rebecca) Harding, an influential speech and debate teacher at BHS through the 1980s and ’90s.
“I think there’s a whole legion of people all across the country who studied with her,” Nezhukumatathil said. “I was so super shy when I moved (to Beavercreek) … I get choked up thinking about it. She just made every person feel so special, and I would never have been able to thrive at Beavercreek, literally, without her. … I still credit her to this day for being able to talk. I would never be able to be a professor without her.”
“World of Wonders” is available online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and many other places books are sold.