According to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, at the end of 2020, 82.4 million people were forcibly displaced either outside their home country as refugees or internally within their nation’s borders (unhcr.org).

This number has become of growing concern right here on my own doorstep. In recent weeks and months, people in Ethiopia, where I am living, are being internally displaced because of an escalating civil war, and some are fleeing to neighboring countries. I have been deeply distressed by the magnitude of this problem and what I have been hearing in the news and in the community around me.

Whenever I am faced with troubling news, I turn to prayer. But when a problem is so widespread, so seemingly colossal, how does one effectively pray? One day, an answer came to me loud and clear in these words about God from Hymn 136 in the Christian Science Hymnal: “Thy presence ever goes with me / And Thou dost give me peace” (Violet Hay, © CSBD). God gave me this answer, which, interestingly, had also helped me pray about my own feelings of displacement some months earlier.