Part Two: Prayers For Ordinary Moments - To Light Their Way

: Prayers for Ordinary Moments

THE CURIOSITY AND CARE my children bring to our evening walks amaze me. Our neighborhood has wooded paths that twist and turn behind our 1970s split-level houses. While I check my watch to measure my heart rate and my steps, my preschooler marvels over the wild blackberries, delights in the vibrant hues of the setting sun, and lingers near the noisy woodpecker in the tree. His older brothers have a keen sense for spotting the sleeping deer I never would have noticed. They have the spiritual eyes to see the wonder in the ordinary.

What’s a regular walk to me is a wilderness journey to them. As we forge along the paths, they skip ahead and shout out what they see, reminding me of God’s goodness, of God’s promise never to leave us or forsake us (see Deuteronomy 31:6). I find myself asking God to give me the perceptiveness of a child so that I might feel the Spirit in my everyday comings and goings.

Paula D’Arcy puts it this way: “God comes to us disguised as our life.”2 She experienced God’s love in the depths of grief—her husband and one-year-old child died in a car accident when Paula was three months pregnant—and she has spent her life ever since writing about God’s presence in our everyday realities.

In times of sorrow, like a funeral, or in times of celebration, like a wedding, we often remember to pray as we mark the significant moments of life. But when it comes to the ordinary rhythms and routines of everyday parenting—packing lunches, rushing out the door in the morning, helping with homework—it’s easy to get caught up in the next thing on the agenda. It’s easy to lose sight of the sacred invitations God gives us in the smallness of our lives.

Changing a diaper, mixing cookie dough, fixing a flat tire—all of these can be opportunities for prayer stitched into the fabric of life together.

In our prayers for everyday victories and defeats, we quiet our hearts and center ourselves in the present. It’s often said that our children will change the world someday, and as adults, we can get lost in this future thinking. We ask sticky preschoolers what they want to be when they grow up and inquire what broody teenagers will study in college. (I admit, there’s a “future freedom fighter” shirt hanging in my son’s closet.) But when we get lost in this language, we miss out on God’s image in our children right now; we gloss over God’s reflection in the daily rhythms of life.

Our children reflect the very image of God, and it’s a gift to be fully with them in the present, not because of who or what they may be in the future. I want to raise children who are awake to the world around them and to the needs of their neighbors. I want to be intentional in acknowledging the ordinary moments of our lives, because who my children are—who our family is—matters right now. Our children’s stories don’t start the moment they turn eighteen; God began writing the chapters of their lives way before we can even imagine (see Genesis 15:5).

As a parent to a child with significant disabilities, I have become keenly aware of the celebration of the small things, the sacredness of the quiet moments, and the power of staying in the present. Parenting a child who is dependent on my care, who may never hit the milestones of her typically developing peers, has reminded me of the importance of right now (see Matthew 6:34). We are called beloved simply because we are God’s children. God’s love is not contingent on what we do or what we achieve—and the same is true for our children.

God’s delight doesn’t require anything of us, which is countercultural to our production-focused, output-required ways of thinking. We have a God who delights in the small things. We see God’s love in the beauty of today, in the vision of what is. When we begin to see parenting as a holy circle instead of a rigid line, our prayers become so much more than bargaining with God, so much fuller than the “if, then” statements.

In the liturgical calendar of the Christian church (see the appendix on page 205–206), half of the year is called “Ordinary Time.” It’s the space after Easter and before Advent, when there aren’t major holy days. As a parent, I often feel that time inches by, and then all at once, I’m scrolling on my phone late at night, lost in photo albums of soft cheeks and squishy rolls of my son who is now almost taller than me. So much of our lives happen in these seemingly ordinary moments. If only we could see them as extraordinary.

May these prayers put words to the small yet sacred moments of life together, reminding us that God is in all things (see Colossians 1:17).