In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful,
we commend to your gracious care and keeping all the men and women of our armed forces at home and abroad. Defend them day by day with your heavenly grace; strengthen them in their trials and temptations; give them courage to face the perils which beset them; and grant them a sense of your abiding presence wherever they may be.
Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart, and especially the hearts of the people of this land, that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace.
You have commanded us to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us. Lead them and us from prejudice to truth; deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty and revenge; and in your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before your throne.
O God, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light rises up in darkness for the godly: Grant, in the midst of doubt and uncertainty, the grace to ask what you would have me to do, that the Spirit of wisdom may save me from all false choices, and that in you light I may see light, and in your straight path may not stumble.
Praise be to the loving God of all the worlds.
Adapted from the Book of Common Prayer