Heavenly Father, we come to you seeking comfort and understanding.  Firefighters and rescue personnel who daily risk their lives to save strangers have paid the ultimate price for their love of others.

We come to you with hearts filled with pain and sadness beyond what words can describe.  We don't understand what has happened, we can't even comprehend the destruction and devastation we witnessed or what we have seen and heard since then.

We thank you, that you provide to us people who are willing, against all odds, to risk their lives daily to protect us.  We thank you Lord for the brave Firefighters, Paramedics, Emergency Medical Technicians and other rescue workers who rushed into a living hell to save others in Washington, Somerset, and New York.

We ask a special blessing on the emergency service providers who lost their lives in New York.  While others ran from the area, these brave rescuers ran towards the building in an attempt to save others.  As your son has taught us, greater love has no man than to lay down his life for a friend.  These brave firefighters paid the ultimate price for their love of others; strangers they had never met.  We ask a special blessing upon them.

Father, be with the husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, children and loved ones of these brave protectors as they attempt to cope with their loss.  For the firefighters across the United States and the world, we ask you to hold and comfort them as they hurt and are in pain too, as they have lost their brothers and sisters.

We thank you Lord that out of evil and desperation you bring good and hope for the future.  For we know that as our great shepherd, even though we walk in the vally of the shadow of death, you are by our side.  Beyond death in an unknown life, where you, in goodness and kindness, welcome us to dwell in the house of the Lord forever.  Death in not the end, but just the beginning.

Lord we have sent you some of the finest from our ranks.  Men and woman who love their God and served well their fellow mankind.  Give them peace and eternal life, give us understanding, and may your love strengthen and support us in our hour of need, so that we may go forward in the spirit of the love they have so greatly demonstrated to us by their actions.

Father, in the silence of this moment, we ask you to hear our individual prayers:

By: Tom Savage, Past Chairman of Pennsylvania Fire and Emergency Services Intitute Advisory Board