O God, you have loved each of us
since before we were born,
and you love each of us in equal
and abundant measure.
Yet we sometimes choose not to
see ourselves in one another.
We sometimes choose to live as though
we were not the brothers and sisters
we know ourselves to be.

Pour your blessings upon
all your people in every nation,
especially in the United States and Iraq,
for whom we pray today,
whatever their faith or ethnicity.
Preserve their lives,
deliver them from the terror of war,
and, when this is over, guide them
in the way of reconciliation and peace.
Bring them a deepening sense of
their oneness in the human family,
that those things that unite your people
may be seen and felt as greater
than anything that can ever divide us.
Amen.

Barbara Cawthorne Crafton in Women's Uncommon Prayers: Our Lives Revealed, Nurtured, Celebrated by Elizabeth Rankin Geitz, Marjorie A. Burke, Ann Smith