Praying With Owen

Every night after we have finished getting Owen ready for bed I hold him and both mom and I sing a song to him and then I pray before we put him into bed. The songs are generally some old hymn. I used to think that he probably wasn’t retaining much of what we sang to him, but then one night I stopped while singing a line from “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and he finished it for me. Since then I like to pause in my singing to hear him chime in. And then we pray.

It is interesting praying with a two year old because he has no idea about who or what God is except that which we have given him through the stories we read him, the songs we sing him, and the way we pray when we tuck him at night. It is a sobering thought. And given how much he picks up on the words we use and the way we use them, it really means that I can’t just do this by rote unless I want him to think that is what prayer is. (Cute sidenote: whenever he hurts himself Clara has taught him to pray for God to heal his pain. So he will bonk his head and come up to me crying “God heal it.” God may heal it, but daddy still has to kiss it.)

We always pray and thank God for everything good he has given us and ask him to help us acknowledge all of the blessings that we routinely overlook. We ask him to bless Ellie and help us figure her out and help her to grow up big and strong; we thank him for mommy and how hard she works for us and how patient she is with Owen and Ellie and how much she loves us; we thank him for daddy’s job and ask him that he would guide daddy on what we should do in the future.

But the crux of my prayer is when I pray for him. I want him to know what my desires are for his life. What I consider to be important to his future and his happiness. I begin by thanking God profusely for the chance to be the father of this little boy, for what a joy and grace he is to me, and just how fun it is to play with him and read with him and eat popcorn and watch football with him. And then I pray that God would save him and pour out his grace upon Owen’s life and that my boy would grow up to give glory to God and treasure God in all things. When I pray for his character I pray that God would make him strong and humble (he used to laugh whenever I said the word humble and repeat it), someone who is soft-hearted but firm in his convictions, someone who lives a life of love for the people around him, and lays his life down for his friends and gives them life by his sacrifice.

I pray other things on other nights, but those are the things that are always there. That is what I want for my son. That is my vision for his life. And as I have prayed those things night after night for the past several months, it has become clear to me that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I don’t mean this in a self-centered way. I very much am praying for Owen at night. What I do mean is that in order for these prayers to come true I need to model a lot of this stuff for my son. If I want him to be strong and humble, then I need to show him what a strong and humble man looks like. If I want him to have a soft-heart but firm convictions I need to orient my life in the same way. That is what I mean when I say that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I am asking that God would make me that way so I can show it to him, not because it will save him, but that God may use my example to call Owen from darkness into light and from death to life.

Parenting is hard regardless of how you do it; praying those types of prayers for your kids only ups the ante as far as I am concerned. I am the most influential person in my son’s life and the question I confront every day is how I will use that influence. And by God’s grace it will be doing my part to help my requests to God become the reality of my son’s life.