Like many parents I have spent time over the summer praying for my child’s school year. As she enters a new school with all the trepidation associated with making new friends and getting used to new routines, I repeatedly petitioned God to provide her just the right teacher and classmates. My concern for her was understandable; she is growing up quickly but she is still my little girl, and I want this new experience to be a good one for her.
However, a few weeks ago as I was praying that God would give my child the best teacher as well as sweet friends, my heart was pricked with a pain of conviction. My prayers were fixated upon what would be best for her without much thought to the people that she would come into contact with. My child was not only going to a new school with her cares and concerns but she would be interacting with a teacher and with classmates that would have their own burdens to bear. Ostensibly she was going to school to learn, but regardless of the reason she is going somewhere, I want her to see any place that she is in as a place to display God’s love. I was concentrating on with whether the new school year would be a blessing for her – without bringing before God the prayer that she would be a blessing to others.
And so the aim of my prayers shifted. Not because my previous prayers were in error; it certainly makes sense to pray for your child’s well-being. However, if I want my child to develop an eternal mindset, it certainly seems reasonable that my prayers for her reflect the concerns of eternity. I concentrated these re-focused prayers in three areas:
My Kid’s Teacher
The angst that goes into finding out which teacher your child has been assigned is a scenario every parent understands. However, rarely do we think about the process from the teacher’s perspective. In less than 24 hours, names on a page become young people entrusted to their care – with their associated quirks and differences in abilities. A teacher’s job is not easy – and there are many students who make this job harder. Instead of simply praying that my kid would get the teacher that would be the best for her, I started praying that my child would be assigned the teacher to whom she could be the biggest blessing. I prayed that my daughter would be an encouragement and help to a teacher who is likely stressed while balancing a myriad of competing priorities. I asked that God would give my child the teacher who would not only appreciate her intellectual curiosity but who would be blessed by her sweet and caring spirit. My heart’s desire became not that my child would have the teacher with the best instructional methods or greatest classroom environment, but instead to have the teacher that will know Christ more fully because of the year spent interacting with our family.
My Kid’s Friends
As we all know from our own growing up experience, kids can be cruel. Therefore, it is tempting to focus my prayer for my child’s friends solely on whether they will be people who will show kindness and grace to her. However, I also know that there will be people that my child will play with who need the opportunity to laugh at her silly jokes and be blessed by her sensitive heart. In other words, there are kids who will become my kid’s friends not because it is God’s primary purpose that they will be a blessing to her – but because she will be a blessing to them. I pray that God gives me the grace to see who these friends are and that my child will, in her childlike way, show them the love of Christ.
My Kid’s Classmates
Although there will be individuals who my child will naturally get along with, there are some kids that my child might not be friends with but with whom she will come into contact. At every school, and in every classroom, there are kids who sit on the fringes. They may think or behave in ways that kids don’t quite understand, and without knowing any better how to handle it, they may be quickly ostracized, or worse, ridiculed. Instead of praying that my child would not find herself as one of the outcasts, my prayers became that she would find these kids. My petition has been that God would grant my daughter the eyes to see the people that are hurting and that she would reach out to them; that in a world full of sin and pain, she would be a light in their lives. You never know the difference that a smile or gracious word can make to a hurting child, and I pray that my kid would be the one to provide it.
Preparing My Heart
I didn’t know why I experienced the prompting to change the focus of my prayers a few weeks ago, but I now know that it was, at least in part, to prepare my heart. In the last few days we have learned more about what this school year will look like for my daughter, and it wasn’t what I expected. In His kindness, God had already begun the process of shifting my mindset to consider how He may want to use my child to bless others, rather than focusing solely on the blessings He has prepared for her. And even though the school year begins with more uncertainty than I originally anticipated, I can confidently still utter my back-to-school prayer. Because regardless of whether it is a great or challenging year for my kid, I pray that because of her, someone else’s year is blessed.
