Do you feel like hiding under a blanket these days? If so, W. David O. Taylor gets it.

“It’s tempting to shut down emotionally in light of all of this violence. It’s tempting to give into despair,” he writes. “’So goes the world,’ we might say, wishing it were otherwise but feeling powerless to make a difference… But our world is a violent one and the Bible does not allow us to ignore its violence or to explain it away with tidy theological slogans. It asks us to face our world squarely, together, and, where needed, to yell our rage to God.”

In “15 Prayers for a Violent World,” Taylor gives us words to cry, yell, or whisper. Christianity has a long tradition of leaning on the words of Scripture and the saints when we do not know what to pray. May the prayer below, and the 14 others in Taylor’s piece, give you not only a vocabulary but a vision for God’s work in our violent world.

A Prayer of Bitter Lament:

Merciful God, you who weep with those who weep, who rescue the oppressed, who incline your ear to the needy and who bind up the brokenhearted: hear our prayer. Bring an end to our distress. Preserve our lives. Rescue us. Heal us. Be near to us this day. We pray this in Jesus’ name, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, on whom we cast all our cares. Amen.