When You Are the One Who Is Afraid
Every prayer book on this shelf prays for the child. This one prays for the person holding it.
The person awake at three in the morning is the parent. The fear is in the parent. And children live inside the atmosphere their parents make - which means your fear is not a private matter. It is the weather in the house.
So there is nothing in here asking God to change your child. All 66 prayers are about the dread, the guilt, the exhaustion, and the suspicion that you have already got it wrong.
ARRANGED BY THE FEAR, NOT BY THE AGE
- The Fear That Arrived With Them - the low-level dread that started the day they existed and has not stopped
- The Fear of the World They Are In - roads, water, illness, screens, other people, money
- The Fear That I Have Already Damaged Them - the day you shouted, the years you were not really there, the thing you said that they still quote
- The Fear of Losing Them - including the version nobody says out loud, and the child who is here and unreachable
- The Fear of Their Choices - biting your tongue, the person they chose, a choice that is harming them
- The Fear That I Am Not Enough - the sentence you say to yourself when you are tired
Eleven prayers in each. Three pages per prayer: what the fear actually is with the verse printed in full, then the prayer, then a lined page for your own words.
THE PAGES NOBODY ELSE WRITES
For the child I find harder to love. For the fear I have passed on. For doing this alone. For the guilt that is useful and the guilt that is not. For being weak in front of them. For putting it down tonight.
EVERY VERSE PRINTED IN FULL - King James Version, public domain, reproduced without alteration. Most books give you references and leave you to look them up; nobody does that at half past ten. There is also an index by need, for the night you do not want a section - you want the page for this.
NO WARFARE LANGUAGE AND NO PROMISES. This book will not tell you that praying hard enough guarantees an outcome. That implication is cruel to every parent whose child struggles anyway.
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