Mother’s Prayers

By Contributing Writer, Yvonne Harink

This week marks a special milestone for our family, as we celebrate our first wedding. It’s a time to reflect on the nineteen short years that our daughter, Angela, was a guest in our home.

When our children leave us to start their own families, it’s a comfort to remember that they always were God’s children. He conceived them before the foundations of the earth and only gives us a few years to train and teach them in the way they should go. After that we trust that He has His ways and means of continuing His transformational work. In fact, as humbling as it is to admit, it was His work from start to finish.

As parents we set out with lofty goals for our children. Yet, if we are honest, we have to admit that we’ve learned more lessons from our children than they ever learned from us. They taught us that parenting is the most significant work we will ever be called to do.

Impacting the life of a person created in the image of God Himself is indeed the most glorious and humbling of all jobs. We named this daughter Angela, and I often think that it is a fitting name. She was named after the Angels. Angels are messenger of God, and God uses them to teach us and minister to us. In a certain sense all children are sent as messengers. God uses them to promote his kingdom and teach parents profound lessons in patience, trust, and humility.

I have a special photo album in which I scrapbooked one page for each precious newborn bundle. Every now and then I page though the album and compare the little faces, all ten of them, and marvel at the special, unique person that grew out of each little baby.

I also use this album to save meaningful poetry that expresses thoughts and emotions I could not have captured.

Today I want to share a few of those poems, which are really prayers, that have given me strength along the way.

For the “little years” I love this one:

Oh give me patience when wee hands

Tug at me with their small demands.

And give me gentle and smiling eyes.

Keep my lips from hasty replies.

And let not weariness, confusion, or noise

Obscure my vision from life’s fleeting joys.

So when, in years to come my house is still-

No bitter memories its rooms may fill.

- Author Unknown

Mothers are teachers whether they home school or not. Leslie Hills’s poem, The Teacher, captures our complete dependence on God’s grace and forgiveness every step of the way as we teach and instruct our children:

LORD, who am I to teach the way

To little children day by day,

So prone myself to go astray

I teach them KNOWLEDGE, but I know

How faint they flicker and how low

The candles of my knowledge glow

 

I teach them POWER to will and do

But only now to learn anew

My own great weakness through and through.

I teach the LOVE of all mankind

And all God’s creatures, but I find

My love comes lagging far behind

 

Lord, if their guide I still must be,

Oh, let my little children see

Their teacher leaning hard on THEE

 - Leslie Pinckney Hill

 A Believer’s Prayer for his Children helps me focus on how to pray for my children, and what to ask for on their behalf:

I do not ask for riches for my children

Nor even recognition for their skills

I only ask that you will give them

A heart completely yielded to Your will.

I do not ask for wisdom for my children

Beyond discernment of Your grace.

I only ask that You will use them

In their own appointed place.

I do not ask for favor for my children

To seal them on Your left or right.

But may they join the throng in heaven

That sing before Your throne so bright.

I do not seek perfection for my children

From them my own faults I would hide.

I only ask that we might walk together

And serve our Savior side by side.

- Phyllis Didriksen

As a final prayer I’ll leave you with A Prayer for My Children which has been translated from the Dutch.

Lord, I entrust into Thy hands my children’s names.

Engrave them there in script that no one can delete.

That none can ever burn them from Thy palms with flames

Not even when Satan wants to sift them as the wheat.

Lord, Hold them in Thy hands when I must se them free.

And with Thy strength over my childrens weakness hover.

Thou know’st the world will hate them with intensity

If they reject this world and turn to Thee for cover.

I do not ask Thee to keep them from all sorrow,

But comfort them when loneliness and fear are strong

And in Thy covenant keep them for the morrow

And let them never stray from Thee their whole life long.

Lord, I entrust into Thy hands my children’s names!

 - by Geeske Wiersma

Isn’t poetry a special gift from God? My mother loves to slip meaningful poems into her cards. They can be used to comfort, inspire, and provide food for thought. They can be framed, scrapbooked, or simply read.

And isn’t it awesome to be able to pour out our hearts directly to our Heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ? What a privilege that we can formulate our own words, use the thoughts and ideas of others, and use the prayers formulated for us by the Holy Spirit himself, given to us in Scripture.

Can you imagine raising children without prayer? It says in Matthew 18: 6: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” If it wasn’t for our Savior, Jesus Christ, there is not a parent alive who does not deserve this treatment.

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