Lord, we are blessed to live in a country where the mortality rate for children from birth to five is relatively low. I cannot thank you for that without also feeling heaviness and lament that the opposite is true in many other countries.
Even without death being a looming possibility for most American children, I still want to ask Your protection for them in these vulnerable years.
I pray especially for young children who are separated from one or both
of their parents for extended amounts of time, whatever the reason–divorce, death, illness, job travel ( e.g. military) or daycare.
I am crying for the reality and for the price that our children pay in these situations. Asking God to make a difference. Somehow. In ways I can’t imagine. In family scenarios that are far from the way we want them to be.
I wish God would protect every young child from the pain and negative effects of separation from one or both parents.
But God, where I do not see Your protection, I ask and trust that You transform and redeem and make Your glory known, in the pain and through the pain, in very real ways.
I also pray for adults who are loving, caring for, bonding with little ones not their own–the daycare workers, foster parents and grandparents raising someone else’s child. I pray that believers in these positions can make a difference:
(1) no matter for how short a time they care for a child or
(2) how limited their influence seems or
(3) how many other problems a child has, which seem to drown out the love being given.
Lord, help these caregivers not give up when they don’t see results. I pray that Your light still shines through them and makes a difference, no matter how futile their efforts sometimes seem.
P.S. If this dialogue mixed with my prayers seems too cerebral, well, it does to me as well. The non-cerebral prayer words I have are:
God, make it stop. Make it better. Don’t let these children be messed up or have their trust broken before they even get a chance at choosing to trust you. Fix it, please! Now?!
But, even those words don’t really express my heart’s true groanings and my prayers mixed with deep trust. As always, my words are inadequate, and more words don’t fix the problem.
Better stated prayers are always welcome as comments below.
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it shakes me to think that others have a deep desire to see these kids grow up in Christ.
makes me ask myself what am I doing to help this process?
may God answer this prayer…
I wish God would protect every young child from the pain and negative effects of separation from one or both parents.
I pray especially for young children who are separated from one or both of their parents for extended amounts of time, whatever the reason–divorce, death, illness, job travel ( e.g. military) or daycare
I am a little puzzled frankly at the way you mix divorce and daycare in with illness and death. As if these were the major problems that children face.
Since I do work with children let me share with you the little golden girl who came to us closed into her own little world – taken from her mother, a prostitute, then in several foster homes, but now happily adopted by a teacher who works full time, she knows a loving home and stability. She could be in no better place.
The same teacher sheltered another girl for several months who was being sexually abused by her adoptive father.
Don’t rail against separation and divorce, working mothers and daycare. We are no longer in the garden. Dip yourself into the poorest zip code in your country, as I have, and involve yourself with those children and let them tell you how they live.
I pray for children who are beaten, abused, belittled, don’t have enough to eat, have been deserted by parents that don’t love them and have no one else to shelter them. Children with FAS and children who flinch every time you lift your hand because they only know one reason for a hand outstretched.
I pray for the mothers and fathers, who come in to to pick up their children, some of them abused, some the abusers, all of them in pain. They sit in our office and hold back their tears – and sometimes they don’t.
This is my reality. Sorry if I am being too hard on you but I have seen the havoc of traditional cultures where women don’t work and can’t get divorced.
Where is compassion? I am so grateful for a gov’t that provides no-fault divorce and I am grateful for daycare.
My dilemma now is that I don’t know how to help other women in traditional immigrant cultures who don’t have the skills and the support to escape their own hells. I can’t just tell them to leave, how can I help them face ongoing abuse?
If you have any suggestions, please.
I apologize, Eclexia, for my rant – I too am looking for answers, but have simply phrased the question a slightly different way.
Suzanne, I don’t think you are being too hard at all. And no apologies for the rant. I agree with you in your rant and I say amen to your prayer that I hear all through the agony and the questions. The things you are saying were on my heart as I tried to figure out this prayer. I always struggle to put my tears into words. I am not a big picture person and it is hard for me to summarize such a big, complicated “need”. The only way I could figure out how to do it was to come at it from the angle of separation, because lack of bonding is a significant factor (though by no means the only or the worst–how do you pick a “worst”? You can’t.) Because of my own inadequacy in trying to put my huge prayer into limited words, I am thankful for the words you have added to mine.
In choosing to pray for the effects of separation on young children, I was not making a statement that separation should never happen. I really am not railing that separation should never happen or judging the situations and people that “facilatate” (for lack of a better word) those separations. Praying for the effects of something that I see as having negative effects doesn’t equal (to me) condemning that situation. I took out a disclaimer from the post along the lines of, “by praying for children in these situations, I am not judging their parents.” Since I didn’t think I was judging in my post and since people get on me for too many disclaimers, I took it out. (I also felt like saying, “I’m not judging” if people were sure I was would just make them more sure I was. So I felt a bit caught.)
I included illness and death and long term travel separations, not because they carry equal weight to the other root reasons for necessary separations, but because children in those situations still do sometimes carry scars from that separation. Also, including those things was one way of saying, the reasons for separation are many and I am not passing judgment on the why, just caring deeply for the children who are in these situations.
I know from firsthand experience on many levels that a child’s separation from parents is often the only option in a world full of sufferings that are relatively much weightier than divorce or daycare. The fact that daycare and foster parenting are great options in some situations makes me simultaneously (a) grateful for foster parents and daycare (which is why I prayed for Christian daycare workers and other “surrogate” parents) and (b) desperately sad.
I had very specific situations in mind when I wrote this post. It wasn’t easy to try to summarize and join together one common theme in such different scenarios. I knew at the time I couldn’t adequately cover all the complexities in my heart’s cries for the children I know personally and all the ones I don’t know about. Here are some of the children my heart was aching for when I wrote the post:
1. My own children. I am divorced, and I am the one who separated. I left because I was afraid and no longer felt safe in my own home. I have four children. I am sad and my heart breaks for the difficulties I already see my children facing because they shuffle between parents. I don’t rail at myself that I should go back to prevent the difficulties that they face because of separation. Because the reasons for the separation are also very big and very real. But I still pray for the effects of that separation in their lives, even though I can’t undo the necessity of the separation. I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago on a weekend when they were gone. And every Monday when they come back, I see the pain and upheaval as they deal with weekly instability that I wish didn’t have to be in their lives. That is the very real context where I trust God for them. My preschool daughter has to leave one parent every 3-4 days to be with the other. I see that affecting her negatively and it is awful for me.
2. My brothers and sisters, who were adopted, some of whom never bonded. “Reactive attachment disorder” carries a lot of emotional weight in our home–broken health, ruined finances, criminal activity, physical danger. Children who don’t bond can do terrible things. My heart has felt like it has been breaking for years over both sides of the coin–watching a child try to systematically destroy people who wanted to love him, and crying out for the child who could never receive love and never trust. Where all the deck seemed stacked against him before he ever had a chance. I sometimes hated the investment my parents put into children who seemed bent on destroying our family. And at the same time I wrestled with God and cried deeply about how these kids could have been so destroyed before they ever had a chance. It is all so messed up.
3. The scores of foster children who came through my home while I was growing up. Twice my parents “quit” because they couldn’t handle it–loving and caring for children only to have them return home to drug addict parents and then be back in foster care with cigarette burns all over their body again. The foster baby whose fourth home in 9 months was with my parents and was moved again before she was a year old. That just happened recently and is part of the reason my parents “quit” the second time. I say “quit” lightly, because they are still raising three boys–they are legal guardians to two of foster children who have lived with them for four years, and they are also raising my nephew.
4. My nephew whose Dad (who never bonded) couldn’t bond to him. Whose Mom drank while she was pregnant with him so that now, with FAS, it is almost impossible for him to connect any action with its consequences. My heart breaks for my parents who are trying to raise him. They have already lived through destructive (and costly) actions his Dad (my adopted brother) did. They haven’t given up, but most days it seems like nothing they do will ever undo what has already happened to my nephew, the perpetual fallout, in many ways (though not exclusively) from the abandonment and abuse his Dad experienced as a baby. What do I do with the conflicting emotions of wishing my parents weren’t going through this again, and yet aching for my nephew and hoping that maybe, just maybe, my parents’ love will make a difference. I want my parents to retire and enjoy life free of messed up kids. And at the same time, I am proud of them and thankful on behalf of the kids they are still hanging in there for.
5. The foster baby who was raised by a friend’s daughter and her husband, from birth. And then, at eight months a judge ruled that the baby should be with family, so ordered that he go to live with a grandfather and stepgrandmother, many states away. The baby, who had bonded with the foster parents, left the court that day with another family. Who’s to decide what the best option was in that situation? Was there a good option? The baby hopefully will be loved and well cared for by his grandparents. All I know is, I wept for that baby who had no clue, when the only Mom he’d ever known buckled him into the carseat, that he would never see her again, not during the three day car trip to his new home, not after the trip was done. Maybe he’ll be okay. Maybe (I hope) he’ll bond with the grandparents, and the positive effects of the first eight months in a good home will carry more weight as he adjusts to his new family, than the effects of the trauma of being dramatically and suddenly separated from the people he was bonded to. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have gone to the grandparents, just grieving the effects of this separation.
So, you see, all my prayers–for children and for people who try to make a difference in children’s lives–are very loaded with a complicated mix of emotions and disturbing realities. I’m “all over the place” with this topic in my own emotions, and I hated trying to put those things into words. And I felt ahead of time how inadequate (and possibly misunderstood) any words would be. So in a funny way, your rant freed me up to rant back about all these frustrations that I felt while writing this prayer
Not in a compete-with-Suzanne rant, more of joining with you in the unanswered mess.
I knew it was an oversimplification to focus only on separation. That, however, was the limitation I faced in trying to figure out how to put into words the cries I feel and pray for the whole, awful mess of hurting children in a world that is messed up. I hate choosing what to pray for in a world with thousands of awful, heavy problems. Why did I choose this and not abortion? Why not poverty in general? Why not mental illness and all the pain that goes along with that? Injustice? I don’t know. My heart aches for it all.
One of the reasons I didn’t want to do this 4-week post was all the things that wouldn’t be included in 4 prayers. And finally, I just said, “I will articulate four prayers. Not necessarily on the heaviest and worst realities in our country. And I will know that it will be frustrating to people who see my prayers as missing the point or excluding something else more severe. But I will be okay with that, because I agree before I start that in praying for any one thing I am missing the point and excluding a whole bunch of other things.” Plus, if people are frustrated with me, they won’t be “against” me–I’m already agreeing with this frustration.
I chose the four prayers I did and the angles I come at them from, just because they are things that happen to be regularly heavy on my mind at this time in my life. I sometimes get almost paralyzed by so many options that I don’t know how to start anywhere. I ask myself, why are you working on this, when that is more important? That is my perpetual struggle and I agreed to verbalize these prayers, even knowing I would hate the feeling that by focusing on one issue it would sound like I was minimizing other issues. I’m especially sorry, though, that it sounded like I was implying judgement by focusing on the negative effects of separation.
Forgive my redundancy in this reply and I hope it doesn’t sound defensive. I really am thankful for what you shared. The unanswered questions and reality of no good solutions are part of the anguish I bring to God, not knowing what to say or how to pray. Thanks.
Oh wow, what a response. I won’t rewrite all my own story but I have been through some of the same pain. I am separated but I waited until my youngest was 18 so I wouldn’t have to see the children come and go. There is no one right answer, that is for sure. It is all so painful. I have no idea if I did the right thing in staying so long, but it is done now.
I can see you are in a different situation and your children are younger. I can’t offer any answers but it is very difficult.
I sheltered my children from divorce but at what cost. I’ll never know what the right answer is.
Now I understand that we are ranting together!
However, what was behind my rant. This – I was listening to a sermon a few weeks ago when the preacher said that the main cause of divorce was that women were resisting their roles and trying to dominate men. That was what he thought caused divorce – uppity women. Ouch. That is why I was ranting.
God bless. My heart goes out to you and your children and parents.
Thanks for sharing your heart and for hearing out mine. Thank you, also, Mandy and Johnny for verbalizing your prayers and agreement here. It’s amazing to think how when we agree in prayer, there’s a unity and connection that we share, but also each person’s cry to the Father takes on its own shape and completeness.
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