God’s Got This: Praying For Kids In Foster CareНамуна

Prayer for Christ’s Church to Feel the Burden and Respond in Mighty Ways

Churches are filled with families. God uses many different avenues to build a family. Some biological families, some step families, some spiritual adoption in those who need to feel a parent's love  surrounding them . Within and without the Church, these families are a mixture of happy and hard, folly and friendship, hurt and heroes. In short - families are messy - and claiming faith does not protect you from the brokenness of  this world. In fact, it may be the broken that makes us more useable for the Kingdom while in this world.

Although there has been a tendency for everyone to put on their “Sunday Best” and look a certain part when heading in to worship, we encourage you now to see yourself and your people the way God sees each of us - broken and beautiful. Although the American parental-tendency may lean toward protecting and providing for your own, we urge you to consider the blessings that God has given you as not simply for your comfort and your provision, but as tools to impact the life of a child who does not have parents providing for each creature comfort, extra curricular activity and felt “need.”

Consider how your financial blessings, family margin, and personal journey can positively influence one of God’s kids, knowing that the seeds that are sown may not reap a harvest right away, but that God’s promises to His Church, to His children, to your children and theirs, remain. We’ve already been called to care for the orphan – here is where you can figure out your piece of the puzzle and how that can be an answer to a child’s prayer.

Pray for the American church to stand up as one to create communities that are willing to care for the Modern Orphan in many different ways. From fostering and adopting, to respiting, tutoring, transporting and financially assisting the families who are doing the heavy lifting. Pray that the stigma of a child in care is replaced with the truth that any one of us is one circumstance away from being in a place we never fathomed we would be. Pray for families to step up and be willing to get the training, to find their support community and to not lean into the comfortable but to walk into God’s adventure by welcoming a child from a hard place into their home, with their children, their neighbors, their families. And ask God that for every family who steps out in faith, He would impact 7 times 70 more to do the same.

Dear Jesus -

We are your adopted children. We are none of us righteous and worthy and are all from hard places because we live in a broken world. Help us to embrace the broken while not allowing it to define us. Use the hard stuff we have faced to soften our hearts so that we can extend the grace,  the love, and the acceptance that we have so needed in our own lives, to a child who needs them now. Remove the stigma that some people have placed upon kids in care either knowingly or unknowingly - reminding us that these are NOT bad children, but our vulnerable children to whom something bad has happened. Jesus, help us not lean so hard into comfort and into the protection-mode for our “own children” that we forget to cognizantly choose not to embrace Your kids. Give specific leading, direct encouragement and raise up communities within each church who are willing to help one called-family change the world for another.

Amen!