A Prayer for Anxious Parents Sending their Kids to School

If you're a parent, you know how it feels: it feels scary.

It feels scary to send your kids off to school. It feels especially scary to send your kid off to a new school, whether that be kindergarten, middle school or college.

You want only what is good for your children. You want them to be happy.

You want them to find good friends who will be kind to your kids.

You want them to be loved by their teachers—to be loved as much as you love them, which is from here to the moon and back, and then some.

You want them to succeed in every subject matter, even though you know that it's likely that they'll struggle in at least one—maybe math, maybe chemistry or reading or, worse, test-taking—and that this struggle will cause them to feel like a failure, which they’re positively not.

You also want to protect them from stupid stuff, harmful stuff, mean stuff that they should never see or hear in their young lives.

You want to rescue them from getting their feelings hurt in a way that will create a fracture deep down in their tender hearts but which won't manifest itself for years as a wound in their core identity.

Most of all you want to *be* there with them, even though it would be totally not cool for your kid to have you chaperon them from class to class and from kickball to cafeteria.

You know that this is the beginning of the rest of your life. You're getting them, and yourself, ready for the day that they will fly the coop and become the person that God made them to be in love—far away from your home so that they can make a family and life of their own.

I feel all of these things myself, which is why I wrote a prayer that might help the hearts of other parents to entrust themselves yet again to a merciful God who loves our children beyond anything that we can ask or imagine.

I'm also including here a prayer that I wrote for Blythe that she could memorize and pray in the moment, especially when she feels afraid or overwhelmed.

I've begun praying it myself, in particular at night when I wake up from a disturbing dream.

May the Lord, in his mercy, hear our prayers for our children at the start of this new school year.