Please join us in prayer…
Father, we could never thank our military men and women enough for their courageous service and sacrifice to our country and its people. Admitting our selfish flaws, today we lift up our voices to express gratefulness and honor to these military troops both from the past and present. Show us ways in our communities, churches, and families to thank and love them better.
Keep and protect these heroes and their families; keep our servicemen and women physically safe and in good health; guard them from evil, be a Shield around them, and reflect grace upon them as the apple of Your eye.
Father, we are aware moms and dads, wives, husbands and their children are worried as their loved ones are re-deploying into a zone of terror and disease as a consequence of their commitment to duty. God of all comfort, please comfort their hearts, our hearts. Wrap Your infinite love around us like a warm quilt, and reinforce us to know that all can come to Your throne of grace any time, day or night, to pray for our soldier, Your soldier.
Father, please send Your angels around every one of our servicemen and women, and protect them with Your guiding hand upon them; Your strength within them; Your shield afore them; and Your love around them.
In Christ’s name, Amen
MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) — Six U.S. military planes arrived in the Ebola hot zone Thursday with more Marines, as West Africa’s leaders pleaded for the world’s help in dealing with a crisis that one called “a tragedy unforeseen in modern times.”
“Our people are dying,” Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma lamented by videoconference at a World Bank meeting in Washington. He said other countries are not responding fast enough while children are orphaned and infected doctors and nurses are lost to the disease.
Alpha Conde of Guinea said the region’s countries are in “a very fragile situation.”
Ebola is “an international threat and deserves an international response,” he said, speaking through a translator as he sought money, medicine, equipment and training for health care workers.
Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he was reminded of the start of the AIDS epidemic.
“We have to work now so this is not the next AIDS,” Frieden said.
The fleet of planes that landed outside the Liberian capital of Monrovia consisted of four MV-22 Ospreys and two KC-130s. The 100 additional Marines bring to just over 300 the total number of American troops in the country, said Maj. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the commander leading the U.S. response.
Williams joined the American ambassador to Liberia, Deborah Malac, at the airport to greet the aircraft.
As vehicles unloaded boxes of equipment wrapped in green-and-black cloth, the Marines formed a line on the tarmac and had their temperatures checked by Liberian health workers. (read more)
