I love this time of year: My feed is full of first-day-of-school photos. Bright-eyed littles holding sign-boards showing their grade, new clothes and combed hair and eager anticipation of the year brimming with opportunity. I admit, homeschooling is a little anticlimactic in that department. No new clothes nor combed hair (ha!), and my kids are never quite sure which grade they are in. 😉 BUT, I still love this time of year, and no matter how you educate, it is a sacred season for considering the year ahead that is, without a doubt, brim-full of opportunity.
I recently had a sweet conversation thread going with a dear group of ladies–my college roommates. We shared a house, and there was no shortage of laughter, clothes-swapping, male-visitors (I married one!), and chocolate chips cookies. We’ve stayed in touch over the last 20 years and we now have 33 children between us (!). It is no small miracle we have managed to stay connected over the years.
Recently, one girl suggested we share with each other our prayers for our children’s upcoming school year. Another Mama went first, and just reading her precious heart-felt prayer for her children re-lit a fire in my own heart to earnestly intercede for my kids this year. I realized that because I don’t send my kids “out into the world” each September, I don’t sense the same urgency, or keen sense of need (or whatever you might call it) to pray for my children. I mean, I pray for them, but they’re also RIGHT BY MY SIDE EVERY SINGLE MOMENT OF THE DAY and so… just sayin’…sometimes they’re so close it’s easy to neglect covering them heavily in prayer.
I’m also re-reading one of my favorite prayer books, A Praying Life, by Paul Miller, along with my sister-in-law. I was struck afresh by this page:
I think perhaps, because I’m with my kids all day, I can often look to my own resources, ingenuity, or methods to modify their behavior or address some issue. But when I acknowledge the truth that only God can change their hearts, then I will tackle these issues more effectively: In prayer.
So, I wrote out my 2018-2019 prayers for my children, sent to my sweet sisters in an email, and thought I’d just copy and paste with y’all too, in case it can be encouraging to you as well as you pray for your own children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, or any other children God has entrusted to your care.
For Dutch, 6th grade:
Father, I feel so inadequate to parent and teach a child like Dutch. He is so incredibly different from me, and so wonderfully unique. Please help. Please give me the wisdom to train Him up in the way HE should go, and not try to cram him into a mold of what other kids are like. Help me know what hills to die on. Give me supernatural discernment to know what things are harmless quirks and what things are character issues. Please help Dutch know he is loved beyond measure, accepted and enjoyed and LIKED. Help me demonstrate, with my eyes, tone of voice, words, and actions, that He is precious and valuable, not based on his performance or behavior but because he is Dutch! Help me correct him without crushing him and encourage him without indulging him. Help me fan the flame of faith and his thirst for knowledge. Give him an insatiable desire for knowledge and wisdom. Make sin repulsive to him and virtue appealing to him. He is such a natural leader–may he lead the kids around him into righteousness, kindness, and justice. As he turns 12 and enters adolescence, protect him from anything that would compromise his purity. Protect him from accidental exposure to pornography, and raise him up to be a man of unwavering character. May he always look out for the weak and use his manly strength to protect those around him. Make him selfless and brave, for Your glory. Amen.
For Heidi, 4th grade:
Oh Father, how I love my girl! Thank you for her. It’s like having a friend at home with me each day. Thank you for how she’s blossoming and growing greatly in confidence. Fan that flame into a blaze of beautiful, humble, brave, quietly fierce courage that faces the future with grace and joy. Please protect her from feeling like she lives in Dutch’s shadow, instead allow her to flourish in her own gifts and feel 100% secure in how You’ve made her. God, let her shine your beauty. Help her never doubt her worth, value, or beauty. As she enters puberty, may she never, ever, ever feel insecure about her body, or how she looks. Make her gloriously free from thoughts of self, but let her continue to be unflappable, unstoppable, and amazingly others-centered. Thank you for her incredible emotional maturity and ability to empathize and enter into other’s feelings–let that grow and develop even more. Please comfort her heart as it so often breaks over Oma…this is the hardest part of her life, I know. She is so often broken-hearted over Oma’s suffering, please help me to comfort her. I so often feel lost for words or wisdom, so please give me both when I need them. May she never doubt Your, and our, love for her. May she be a blessing to everyone around her.
There’s no magic, of course, in just the right words, but the exercise of writing out a yearly prayer is a powerful opportunity to aim your heart, prayers, intentions, and therefore your actions actions into the right direction. It’s a chance to reboot your focus, and fix your gaze once again on what really matters. After writing these prayers I realized, they contained nothing about test scores or even about academics.
Certainly we are wise to faithfully intercede for scholastic matters as well, but at the end of the day it is their character–indeed their Christlikeness–that matters.
{For the children’s sake. Thanks for reading.}
Thank you so much for sharing this, Kari! I am encouraged to do the same for my three!