For eleven years I've lived on a busy ambulance route, and I consider it a small part of my mission to pray for ambulances and their quarry when I hear them screaming past. I've called ambulances for people, and I know it can be a fairly desperate situation, so my default is something like this:

Father God, please bless and protect whoever that ambulance is going to. Grant them peace and healing, give them relief from fear and pain. Keep them from despair. May they know your peace! O Lord! Speed the ambulance on, and make the paramedics quick, observant and careful. Lord God, save and rescue them. Amen.

I always make 'Amen' very emphatic, though I don't know how much difference it makes. Sometimes I say it twice or thrice, to shake myself awake, and check I'm making a sincere request of God, rather than just letting my mouth run on muscle memory.

Is there unnecessary detail in this prayer? Well, God knows it all already, and he's not a computer to be programmed, a genie or a rules-lawyering trickster elf, so it's not as if I need to stipulate every little thing, but I worry that, beyond a certain point, the shorter I make it the more it will become automatic, and not from the heart. These are urgent matters, and I trust God to be present in all good and all healing all around the world. It's not like I need to attract his attention or teach him to suck eggs.

But prayer is communication, and when I imagine the person making the call, the one in dire need or peril, the fear, panic and desperate impatience, why isn't the ambulance coming, and I worry about a rising despair: why won't it come, why won't God hasten my relief. Where the hell is that ambulance?!! It pains me. When an ambulance passes, that is happening, right now, in this city, and it gives me a small horror to imagine it, and if I can take that emotion and pass it to God as a small, but impassioned plea, well that's good and necessary prayer. 'Grant them relief before this becomes traumatic.'

Sometimes the siren actually turns out to be a police car, and I don't really know what to pray. I get the rush of must-pray-for-ambulance and then think, oh, it's just the cops. I find them harder to get excited about. Maybe they're going to catch the murderer, but more likely they're hurrying to someone's house to say 'yes, you were burgled, no we won't catch the burglar'. I realise their jobs are bigger than that, but it's complicated, so in their case I ask for some justice. Speed them on, protect whoever needs to be protected. It's a relief, really.

And fire engines? I say, 'Lord, put out that fire, Lord, save that cat from out a tree! Amen. Please don't let anyone's livelihood be utterly destroyed'. But fires are fires! It's hard to get emotional about them. They’re exciting, but a burning house or shop or cathedral is less disturbing to me than a human person clutching at their wound with desperation in their eyes. Hurry up, little ambulance, and calm them down o God! Don’t let the memory of this haunt them year after year, amen, Amen!!