Our Response To The Covenant School Shooting

Dear Emmanuel Family,

I wait to hear from our Presbytery what support our faith siblings at Covenant Presbyterian may need. In the meantime, I know we all will be holding Nashville, the Covenant community, the families who have experienced such horrific loss, all students, families, and individuals associated or affected in any way by the killings yesterday.

Such terrible events reverberate in the hearts of many people for various reasons, bringing doubt, fear, pain, grief. Sadly, school shootings, the loss of children’s lives, is all too familiar in the United States: these mass shootings are a grievous blight upon our culture, but we feel acutely this tragedy as it is so close to home. Stan and I spent the last hours of the morning and into the afternoon “on call” in Green Hills yesterday for two families with teens at Hillsboro High School who could not get to their kids.

As an extension of the Wednesday night prayer ministry, Emmanuel Presbyterian will hold a Candlelight Prayer Vigil on Wednesday at 5:30pm in the sanctuary.

The regularly scheduled Lectio Divina, Supper, and Prayer Circle will take place as planned beginning at 6pm.

Please drop by to light a candle and lift all families involved, our city, and our hurting world in prayer. Pastor Jane will have a printed prayer and candles for lighting.

You might want to stay and rest a while in the holy silence or simply light a candle and continue on after a prayerful pause.

Our intention is to make this 30-minute window of time from 5:30 to 6:00 easy for as many of us as can come to hold the space or simply drop by. While action in many directions is needed to move our world forward to a better place, prayer is real and also needed.

Hold onto one another loved ones,

pray for the Peace of Christ to rest in the hearts of all afflicted,

pray for Christ’s Peace to reign in us all–

Yours in God’s great Love,

Jane