Tash Yates, a doctor who attends Newlife, wrote and offered this prayer for healthcare professionals as part of our Faith @ Work series at Newlife. The prayer is structured around the prayer Jesus taught us to pray:
Our Father in Heaven, Almighty and all caring God,
Lord Jesus, the Great Healer and Physician, the Wounded Healer who knows suffering.
Holy Spirit – our Counselor, teacher, strength and power.
May your Kingdom come, may your Will be done.
We pray for those who work in healthcare professions; those who are here this morning, and those who are currently at work, because disease affects people on weekends too.
Please give us each day whatever resources we need to mediate healing and hope to the patients you bring us.
Help us to ask the right questions, and to truly listen to the answers we are given.
Use our hands, our touch, our skills. Help us discern whether our patients need medications, investigations, interventions, or advice.
As you are the Great communicator, teach us to communicate with excellence.
Give us a healthy curiosity that pushes us to continually learn and grow in our knowledge and understanding of disease, as we seek to help our patients attain wellness, wholeness, and healing.
Please give us friends, family and a church community to support us in our work, and who will help us to keep work in perspective.
Forgive us for the times (sometimes many times a day) where we forget that You are the one at work in our patients’ lives, and we are your assistants. We dress the wounds, but you do the healing.
Forgive us for the times where we find our primary identities in our roles as healthcare professionals, rather than in You.
Forgive us for the times when fatigue, frustration, and the pressures of the work affect the way we relate to others – when we become impatient, unkind, cynical.
Forgive us for when we forget that your very image is in every person you bring into our sphere of influence at work: even the demanding patient, the ungrateful relative, the annoying colleague, the unreasonable boss.
Please help us to forgive others as you have forgiven us.
Lord we ask that you protect us from the temptations that our work can offer us. The temptation to overwork , to think we are indispensable, to believe people when they try to give us glory for our successes.
The temptation to hide our failures, to pretend to ourselves and others that we are infallible.
The temptation to be working to please others rather than You.
The temptation to chase higher -paying jobs, to look for ways of earning money rather than ways of serving you through our work.
The temptation to treat others in our team according to their roles and positions, rather than treating everyone with equal respect and dignity.
The temptation to forget that we too are broken and need Your healing.
Please help us to face ethical dilemmas with courage and wisdom, to bring salt and light into every encounter, to be Christlike in all our dealings. We pray for our colleagues who do not know You, that we would lead such compelling lives that they would want to.
We ask that those in positions of influence, particularly in management and politics, would make wise and creative decisions about how the healthcare system is run. May the dignity and preciousness of each human being be more important to them than financial statements and political point scoring.
In the end we acknowledge that all healing comes from you, that despite our best efforts, there is still ultimately a 100% mortality rate for every person we care for. And so we pray that while people are under our care that you would be glorified, in ways that are meaningful to each and every patient.
We thank you for the privilege of working alongside You – the Great Physician and Healer, Wonderful Counselor, Sustainer of Life. Amen
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