A Mother’s Prayer

How are your kids doing?  As my kids are all transitioning into adulthood (ages 23,21,19, and 17), mine are all doing great!  For now… 

I have found parenting to be the most rewarding, difficult, joyful, and heartbreaking calling imaginable.  The highs can be mountain tops and the lows can be abysmal.

One of the privileges I have as a pastor is the opportunity to pray with so many people for their kids.  Whether the kids are approaching their due date or are collecting social security, their dads and moms are praying for them and asking the Lord to bless them in the midst of this life’s difficulties.

Like so many other spiritual disciplines, praying for our kids requires perseverance – and more of it the older our kids get.  And, sadly, I know some parents who have given up on their kids.  They have written them off.  For all intents and purposes, they have essentially divorced them.  Please never do this.  Be the persistent widow we find in Jesus’ parable (Luke 18:1-8).  “Cry day and night” on behalf of the kids God has entrusted to your care.

I am often reminded of a story that J. Wilbur Chapman[1] told over a century ago when he was writing to pastors and urging them to consider the necessity of prayer:

“I knew of a woman in a city of New Jersey who had six sons.  The boys were all born in a humble home in Scotland.  Five of them were earnest Christians. The sixth was a profligate, and had almost broken his mother’s heart.  One day one of her neighbors came in to see her and sympathize with her in her sorrow.  ‘Mrs. M….,” she said, ‘why worry about John?  Let him go.  You have five boys in the Kingdom.’  One of these boys, who was my friend, said his Scotch mother sprang to her feet, took hold of the back of the chair upon which she had been sitting, and, with tears streaming down her cheeks, said, ‘Let him go!  I will never let him go.  I gave him to God before he was born.  I carried him into the kirk the first day I could walk; I put him upon the altar and took my hands off, and he is God’s boy, and God will have him if He turns the world over to get him.’  My friend said his mother lived long enough to see John a Christian; to see him a judge of one of the highest courts in America, and an elder in the Church.  Let us have faith in prayer…”[2]

Do not let go of your kids.  Hold them up before the Lord in prayer for as long as God gives you life on this earth.  Friends will let your kids go.  Employers will let them go.  In this world your kids will have a thousand people turn their backs on them.  Be sure that your kids never see your back.  Pursue godliness by imitating the father in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15).  Face your child’s direction.  And like the widow of Luke 18, never stop praying.

Your Pastor,

Bob Bjerkaas

N.B. The image is cropped from a woodcut designed by Sir John Everett Millais: The Unjust Judge and the Importunate Widow (1864). The engraving was done by the Dalziel Brothers. This public domain image is made accessible by the Metropolitan Museum of Art online, accession number: 21.68.4(18).

[1] Chapman was a presbyterian preacher and evangelist best known today for writing the hymns “One Day He’s Coming,” and “Jesus! What a Friend for Sinners!”

[2] J. Wilbur Chapman, The Problem of the Work (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911), pp. 41-42.