Moltmann suggests that watchfulness is an essential element of our prayer life. One way that I’ve been attempting to be more watchful and prayerful is by keeping up to date on what’s happening in Darfur and in Nepal.

As you may know, genocide is happening in the Darfur region of the Sudan, similar to the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990’s. International concern is rising, but the slaughter continues unabated - all sponsored by the Sudanese government.

In Nepal, human rights are being threatened by a recent upheaval in the government.

Here’s how you can stay involved very, very easily, and hopefully remind/convince yourself to take some action:
1. Go to news.google.com
2. Enter a term that’s showing up a lot in human rights news, like “Darfur” or “genocide” or “Nepalese”
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Google Alerts link you get.

Or, you can manually make a Google Alerts page for any term by adding it to the end of this address:
http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en&q=
such as
http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en&q=genocide

You’ll be given a chance to get email updates whenever Google News gets info on this term. You can select the frequency with which you receive updates, too. There are tons of uses for this service, but one of the most important is that it allows Christians to use the technology they use every day anyway to feed and inform their spiritual lives.

Watch and pray.