Leader: Loving God, you know us through

Leader: Loving God, you know us through and through, having knit us together in our mothers’ wombs.

People: We praise you for gathering us like a mother hen, for protecting us with the ferocity of a mother bear, and for calming and quieting our souls like a weaned child with its mother.

Leader: We thank you for the gift of mothers and for the examples of faithful mothers in Scripture; for Hagar, who suffered and endured through great injustice to care for her son Ishmael.

People: We pray for all those mothers who persevere through poverty, violence, and…