by jphilo | Mar 22, 2010 | Books and Resources, Different Dream, Spiritual Support
If you’re the parent of a child with special needs, you may have questions about how to pray for your child. This three part series will suggest ways to pray for a child whose future may look quite different from that of a typical kids.
Different Prayers
How to pray depends, in some measure, upon your child’s condition or prognosis. Your petitions on behalf of your child will vary in different situations, such as:
- delayed cognitive development
- a chronic physical condition with no cure
- a highly curable physical condition
- a mental or behavioral disorder
- a learning disability
- a terminal condition
In A Different Dream for My Child: Meditations for Parents of Critically or Chronically Ill Children, parents of children with a wide range of special needs explain how they prayed or pray for their kids. Their advice can provide both guidance and comfort as you begin to pray for your child.
Similar Prayers
But no matter what your child’s condition may be, some of your prayers will be the same as other parents’ prayers. This is doubly true if you are a Christian and pray God’s promises to his children on behalf of your children. So you can pray:
- asking God to grow your child’s knowledge and love of Jesus at whatever level they can achieve.
- to give a child’s life, no matter how short or difficult, purpose and meaning.
- giving thanks for the gift of your child’s life.
- for your child’s provision and protection when you are not with him or her.
- for the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, kindness and self-control to dwell within your child. (Galatians 5: 20-25)
- to use your child’s struggle to build perseverance, develop character, and bring hope. (Romans 5:1 – 5)
Examples, Please
If these ideas seem more like theory than practice, more abstract when you need concrete examples, don’t despair. The second post in this series will provide specific examples of how to pray for your child with special needs. But until then, leave a comment about how you pray for your child.
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by jphilo | Feb 1, 2010 | Daily Life
Despite my best Pollyanic efforts to remain positive about winter, a gloomy chill engulfed me last week. Our cold, snowy, icy, and foggy winter, which came early and shows every sign of planning to stay late, is the obvious culprit. But to be honest, I can’t wholly blame this glum funk on external circumstances.
Part of my Gloomy Gus mood is self-inflicted. In the dark of this cold winter, I’ve been chaffing against the quiet, ordinary tasks God has given me to complete. Day after day, He calls me to be faithful in the non-flashy, by myself stuff – writing blog columns and book proposals, collecting tax documents, answering emails, preparing for speaking engagements, and organizing things for church. Big days in January were the ones when I took Mom to the library to check out books by authors with careers much more successful than my own.
Which points to the crux of the matter. Much of this winter’s discontent is due to flat book sales. For weeks, I watched Different Dream’s Amazon rank sink lower and lower. Nobody emailed to order signed copies. The ones in the local book store were gathering dust. And all three January speaking engagements were postponed because of weather, eliminating any hope of book sales from that quarter.
Through it all, God whispered over and over, “Trust me. Just wait and trust me,” which I did, only because there’s nothing to do in the middle of January except wait for things to improve. The trusting part was harder. But once I realized the other option was to trust myself, which experience has taught me is risky at best, I let the book sales thing go and left it all in his hands.
What happened next? A few books sold on Amazon, the book store called and asked for two copies for their store and a stack to take to some conferences over the next few weeks. A woman wrote a review for her special needs newsletter, and a Detroit radio station asked for an interview. None of which will catapult sales into the stratosphere, but all of which remind me of truth in the winter of my discontent: God is at work in even the small things. He calls me to faithfulness in more small, non-flashy tasks on this winter day.
I look outside and see a frost-covered tree branch shaped like Gonzo’s nose. The thought of the Don Juan of Muppets and his flock of hens makes me smile. The gloom lifts a little, and I tackle the small things once more.
by jphilo | Dec 8, 2009 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
Even though snow is never my weather-of-choice, except on Christmas Eve when a maximum of 2 inches of snow can settle upon the landscape to create a picturesque scene for 24 hours only, the dusting of white stuff that greeted me Monday morning, put me in a philosophical mood.
I had just wrestled a new pair of gorilla treads onto my tennis shoes, and the tracks they created made me think of all the places I’ve been in the past year. One year ago, I was walking on a motel treadmill in West Virginia before delivering my son to the PTSD outpatient clinic. This week, Allen is in Wisconsin speaking at an organic farming conference. What a great distance he’s traveled, what a great distance our entire family has traveled, in the last 365 days. What a great God has guided us into this future we never expected.
I passed our garage, marveling at God’s faithful and unexpected work in our family, and a hole in the edge of the path I’d shoveled caught my eye. There was another hole about 3 feet beyond it, and another and another, all three feet apart, connected by what looked like a miniature mole tunnel, until the tunnel reached the corner of our garage.
I’d heard about mouse tunnels in the snow, but this was the first one I’d seen. I imagined the mouse busily excavating, then poking his head out for a breath of air, a progress check and a course correction. Then, down again to bravely plow through the darkness, until he found shelter from the storm.
This picture doesn’t do Mickey and Minnie’s tunnel justice and the thought of mice camping in my garage sets my teeth on edge. But for a few moments, I identified with the mouse. After years of dark tunnels with small comfort and few answers, after infrequent breaths of hope, little progress, and a multitude of course corrections, we have found sweet shelter and joy in God’s amazing healing and strength.
Call me a softie, but tonight there’s room for Mickey and Minnie in our garage…but if they get in the car again, they’re dead meat
by jphilo | Oct 27, 2009 | Current Events
Since his first appearance in St. Elsewhere, Denzel Washington has been one of my favorite actors. I haven’t seen all his movies, but his performance in Glory and The Great Debaters, which he also directed, are two of my faves.
A couple days ago, I listened to him on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and was impressed with his down-to-earth attitude about acting. Near the end of the interview, Terry asked Denzel about growing up as the son of a Pentecostal minister. Denzel’s response was one of the most gracious witnesses of faith I’ve ever heard.
But, do you think I can locate the interview? No matter how many times I search NPR’s website, it doesn’t show up. But, I did find the following interview at the Reader’s Digest website. While it doesn’t tell as much about the effect his father’s integrity had on Washington’s life, it’s a fair substitute.
Take a look the interview and see what you think. If you’re like me, you’ll be renting every movie he’s been in – perfect entertainment as the nights get longer and the days get colder.
And if you locate the link for the Fresh Air interview, send it to me, please. I’d love to post it so more people can hear it.
by jphilo | Oct 7, 2009 | Daily Life
My heart was heavy Sunday morning. Our dear friend Lyle died Saturday afternoon, leaving behind a wife and two high school-aged sons. My heart grieved for them, even though Lyle’s Christian faith had been his confidence, hope, and joy since his lung cancer was diagnosed a year ago.
When my mind wasn’t on Lyle and his family, I thought about another dear friend. Her birthday was Saturday, the day her daughter was supposed to get married. But the previous weekend, her daughter called and said there were problems. My friend and her husband rushed to the city where she lived to counsel the young couple. In the end, they called everything off. My friend spent her birthday helping her daughter move into a new apartment.
Why did God allow such suffering and disappointment, especially to people like these, good people who serve Christ wholeheartedly? Why is he allowing young people such heartache so early in their lives? Angry questions whirled inside my brain as I trudged down the road. My head bowed under the weight of my doubts. My eyes stared at the muddy road, soft after three grey days of almost constant drizzle and rain, and my feet slipped.
Then a noise, I don’t know what, maybe a bird or a car driving by, lifted my head, and I saw the moon. It waited, full and bright, on the east horizon in the clear, pale morning sky, and it’s sad beauty spurred me to prayer.
Lord, let my friends see this moon, too. Show them the beauty behind their storms. Show them your face and heal their broken hearts. Be their ever-present hope in times of darkness. Amen.
Did God answer my prayer? Did the widow and her sons, the couple and their jilted daughter see the October moon? Did he show them his face? I don’t know. But one day, when God wipes away their tears and collects them in a bottle, the moon will still be there. And they will look up.
