Last month I participated in the National Day of Prayer.  While in some areas and venues this is a very Christian event, Chaplain Mindy Serafin from Indian River Medical Center goes out of her way to invite me and make it a moment of interfaith cooperation.  This year the prayer focused on these words from Nachum:

"The LORD is good, a refuge in times of trouble.(Tzarah)  He cares for those who trust in Him" Nahum 1:7

This quote was accompanied by a prayer by Franklin Graham

President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that our nation should set apart a day for national prayer to confess our sins and transgressions in sorrow, “yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon… announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.”

“We have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our own hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own… we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God who made us!  It behooves us then… to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”

Help us to pray earnestly for our president and leaders who govern, that they will humble themselves and seek Your guidance so that everything we do will shine the light of Your glory in a darkened world.

As I heard these words and the tone of Nachum I was troubled.  As a nation and a world we certainly face many difficulties/challenges/Turis.  But why on the National Day of Prayer focus on our sins and despair.  There are times when we need to act with humility and self reflection but it felt very dark at a time when we could have been called together as a nation of many faiths and peoples all working through our connection to something greater than ourselves.  I was reminded of this Chasidic story from Day by Day:

A general received a message telling him that his main line of defense had been broken by the enemy. HE was greatly distressed and the expression on his face showed it.  His wife, hearing the message, came to him and said: “You have received bad news, I know, but I have just received worse.”  “And what is that,”  he asked.  “I have just read the discouragement on your face,” she replied. “Loss of courage is the worst of news.”

If you are only meeting as an interfaith group for 20 minutes, on a National Day of Prayer, is this tone that will lead us spiritually, religiously and physically to the place we need to go as a nation?  What is the right tone, values, theme that we should express in these moments and venues?

There are plenty of shadows.  The Chasidic Story reminds us getting too focused on the dangers and darkness around.  We have to be careful about wallowing in that valley of the shadow of death…

As we interact with each other and those of other faiths, let us approach these moments and this world with one of our core values – to be an Or Lagoyim – a Light to the Nations.