For 24 hours, members of several Oxford churches and ministries will come together to pray for those in local, state and national government, school officials and law enforcement during the annual National Day of Prayer.
Volunteers from each church will begin meeting at the Burns-Belfry Museum and Multicultural Center at 6 p.m. Wednesday. Each group will receive a folder with names in it and spend about an hour praying for the people on the list.
The prayer vigil will last 24 hours and end at 6 p.m. Thursday, which is the National Day of Prayer.
“There will be folders that contain the names of our leaders in our national, state, city and county governments,” said Janet Davis, who is co-chair for the event along with Sara Pugh. “There will be folders with the names of all our local policemen and firemen and we will pray for each one.”
The annual event in Oxford started in 2010.
On Thursday, a community lunch will be held at 11 a.m. at First Baptist Church, followed by a ceremony in front of the Courthouse at noon.
“We will shuttle people over to the Courthouse from the church, or they can walk if they’d like to,” Davis said.
At the brief ceremony, local pastors and community leaders will speak and pray for the nation and the LOU community.
Second-grade students from Regents School of Oxford will be reading from prayer letters they wrote recently in school.
The National Day of Prayer was created in 1952 by a joint resolution of Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman.
In 1988, the law was unanimously amended by both the House and the Senate and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on May 5, 1988, designating the first Thursday of May as a day of national prayer. Every president since 1952 has signed a National Day of Prayer proclamation.
For more information, visit http://www.gotofirst.org/ or call 662-234-3515.
