Praying for Peace and Prosperity: Reflections on Jeremiah 29:7(a) and Our City’s Healing

Dc. Anna

“Pray for the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile." Jeremiah 29: 7(a)

To pray for the peace and prosperity of the city, one must first have an awareness of just

how and where the people of the city stand in terms of peace and prosperity. This half-verse in Jeremiah takes me to a spiritual place of my early days in Fresno, when I first moved to South 4th Street. I soon noticed the graffiti in the neighborhood and was moved to erase/paint over it, but that seemed futile to me; after I erased it, it just came back.

I felt the need to do something more; to pray for the person who had painted it. As I laid a hand over the graffiti to pray, I realized he (typically) was young and lost, confused and frightened. He certainly did not have peace, and most likely did not have prosperity either. But my prayer could not stop with him... I thought and prayed for his parents. Who raised this lost young man? Did he even know them? I prayed for his probable sexual partners, as well as the children he had most likely fathered both alive (and probably abandoned) by him; or aborted before they could be born. I prayed for the makers and dealers of the drugs he used to try to find relief in his life. I prayed for the graffiti painter to find the only true Peace, Jesus.

Finally, I prayed for the city and culture that so failed this young man that he thought it

was a good thing to paint graffiti, run the streets and ruin his life and damage the lives of others.

I prayed for the people who live in our city almost totally unaware of the anguish of many

in our very midst. I prayed for our city’s people to have deeper connections to each other in all

aspects of our lives; to be Peacemakers, and to realize we all are impoverished without God,

and material prosperity without God is worse, ultimately, than not having enough resources to

live on.