People sometimes ask how reporters handle covering news that is so hard and heavy when it’s easy to get overwhelmed just reading the headlines.
Prayer has been a key practice for my work as a journalist. I don’t think I could do it if I didn’t put my trust in God to guide my reporting, bring justice and healing to those in the stories, and work among the people who read them.
I like the liturgies from Every Moment Holy and from W. David O. Taylor’s Prayers for the Pilgrimage. Here’s Taylor’s liturgy “For Reading the Not-So-Good News”:
O Lord, you who are the herald of good news, help me, I pray, to read the news of this day not cynically but with faith, not despairingly but with hope, and not indifferently but with love, so that I might glimpse and bear witness to your good work in the world. I pray this in the name of the Sovereign of History. Amen.
