Session 5 - A New Beginning

Soon, you will experience a void. Your child will no longer be living in your house. There will be a great shift in your normal rhythms and day to day activities. There indeed will be an empty bedroom, a gap in daily banter and conversation, a more full refrigerator, and less laundry to do. While this may excite you in some ways as part of your daily chores and responsibilities will decrease, you may also feel saddened to face the reality of your child growing up. You may long for days of old, days of bedtime routines, skinned knees, and bubbles, when everything seemed more simple.

While it is completely normal and understandable to walk through various levels of grief of this transition, may you also bravely and obediently step into this new chapter, being fully present to all that is happening within you and your son or daughter. There is a difference in presence and being present. The question is, are you fully present to this new thing that God is doing in your life and that of your child’s? Are you awake or going through the motions? Are you listening intentionally with your heart to your child when they share and the Holy Spirit as He leads you towards what they need?

You have a new beginning, both in your personal relationship with God and with others. As you are present with yourself, not avoiding the sting of the shift, what might you be prompted to do? What if whenever you felt the gap of your child's presence, you leaned into prayer? What if you potentially treated your nostalgia and longing for their presence as the groans of hunger pains when you fast? Every time you pass their room and feel the chasm of their absence, you could in return stop to pray, even a simple one sentence prayer. Deep truly does call out to deep, let it out before the Father. He cares even more than you do about your child. For many, that can be hard to imagine!

Just as you may remember yourself or your partner groaning in labor through childbirth all those years ago; you got to see the fruit of your labor by holding that sweet baby in your arms. Now, you can enter a new kind of labor pain, as you turn to the Father in prayer and fasting for your child while they are away. May this new beginning create a deeper intimacy and connection between you and God and you and your family. May this new beginning be good news for you and them.

Reflection Questions + Prompts:

Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to you how He may want you to regularly pray and/or fast for your child while they are away. How may he be leading you to lean into the sting of their absence through prayer and petition?

Some Ideas include…

• Praying on your knees in their room each morning.
• Place scripture on their chair at the dinner table and reading it over them each night as you come together to eat.
• Set an alarm for the time of their birthday on your phone and pray for them when the alarm goes off each day (for example, if their birthday is September 6th you could pray at 9:06 each day on their behalf).
• Get creative and don’t overthink! Make a choice to begin this rhythm when they move, and invite someone to hold you accountable.