PRAYERS TO MY ANGELS

I try, Lord, I really do try to be a good mother! ("Maybe I try to hard?") I must learn to give help only when asked, and not assume.  I always know what's needed.  Things change so fast.  I need a barometer to gauge moods or a scorecard to identify the players and their positions!  Let me be perceptive.  I want to uphold, not nag, my children.   I am often inflexible when I needed to be adaptable, Lord.  I must allow them to make their own mistakes and learn from them.  My trouble is I love not wisely but too well.   I wonder now and then.  Why I ever applied for the job! (Yes, I wouldn't have it otherwise.)

Guard my relationship with each of my children, Lord.  Sometimes it's a fragile, tenuous thing.  Give them patience with me.  When I'm tired or angry or hurt, control my tone of voice, my words and even the furrows in my brow, Lord, so they can detect beyond the underneath the scolding the true love I bear them.  And help me, Lord, to hold those I love in an open hand.

We cannot go with our children into adulthood; they will have to conquer their own ground, as we did.  But we can keep the home fires burning and the welcome mat out, sensitive to the signals we receive from their battleground and ready for a time when our young adult needs a temporary "R and R" or a chance to fall back and regroup.  "Having done everything," we can only cover them in the armor of our prayers as they go forward.

Dear Lord, 

I want these little girls to know how much I love them.  I want them to know how much joy they have brought to my life....Help them to know how much they are wanted.   Help me to show them how much.  by the sparkle of delight in my eyes when I smile at them.  By how quick I am to drop a mother's chore and play with them.  By the unhurried way I read them stories, even stories I've read to them a hundred times before.  Especially those stories, Lord, because they will create such a vivid memory for them.   Help me to give these girls happy childhoods, filled with late nights and pillow fights and stories read by flashlight under the covers.  May their mornings be filled with building forts, their noons with peanut butter sandwiches eaten in a tree house and their afternnos with barbies and hide-n-go-seek with neighbor kids.   May their childhhod be filled with such happy times, Lord, that when they look back on them, twenty, thirty, forty years hence, the memories will bring a smile to their faces and a reassurance to their heart that they were wanted and that they were loved.