As I pondered this other mother’s words and her pain, I wept. But my tears were as much for myself as for her. I found myself praying with tears that night as I got ready for bed, “Grant me the souls of these children!”

Later, I remembered an Orthodox prayer that I’d read awhile back. “Akathist to the Mother of God, Nurturer of Children,” it’s called. It’s a beautiful prayer, a plea for the souls of our children, an entreaty that they know and follow Christ. It voices my yearning that my children will live a life of faith in Christ lived by the saving power of Christ.

I copied the akathist, so I could have it for my own. Then, being Protestant and all, I changed some of the words. I don’t mind asking Mary to intercede with her Son on behalf of my children, but I do mind asking her to make them devoted to her alone. It’s not devotion to Mary that I desire for my kids but devotion to God. So I fiddled with the words of the akathist, turning it into a prayer to the Triune God, updating the antiquated language of Thee and Thou, and rewording the opening prayers in each section to reflect a more contemporary idiom.

But I left the heart and soul of the akathist mostly alone. It’s theologically rich and linguistically beautiful. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing it with you (it’s long!), in the hope that you will find it as rich and meaningful as I do and, especially, that you will use it to help you pray more frequently and more fervently for the children in your life. Here then are the first few songs of the akathist.

A Prayer for My Children

Holy and victorious God, Perfect Leader and Good Nurturer of the Christian race, we your servants, delivered from evil by the saving power of Your Son, sing out our grateful thanks to You.

You have invincible might: deliver my children from all dangers, I pray. With tears I cry to You: Raise my children (names), to be made worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven, and make them heirs of eternal blessings.

***

Song 1
Holy Jesus, I pray You to send an angel from heaven to my children. I cry to You:
Raise my children to be earthly angels.
Raise my children to be heavenly people.
Raise my children to be Your servants.
Raise my children to cry out to You.
Raise my children (names), O Christ, to be made worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven and make them heirs of eternal blessings.

***

Prelude 2
Loving and powerful God, You see my maternal (paternal) entreaty for my children, begging help of You alone: take my children under the shadow of your wing. I cry to You: Alleluia.

Song 2
Holy Spirit, send my children understanding, that they may know how to serve You well; fill their hearts with heavenly wisdom and grant that they may love it alone and scorn the things of the world. Do not hinder my lips from crying such things as these:
Raise my children to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.
Raise my children to have knowledge of good but not of sin.
Raise my children to be wise against the snares of the devil.
Raise my children to order their lives wisely, following the examples of the saints.
Raise my children, nourishing them with the milk of the hidden wisdom of God, that they may seek it all of their lives.
Raise my children (names), O Christ, to be made worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven and make them heirs of eternal blessings.

***

Prelude 3
May Your power, O Most High, overshadow my children. May they know Your compassion towards all who run to You with faith, and may they cry to You: Alleluia.

Song 3
Having received my children from You, O Lord, I do not desire to behold them dwelling in eternal torment, but rather to see them written in the Book of Life and made inheritors of eternal life. Incline Your ear to my supplication, O God, as I cry to You:
Raise my children to flee eternal torment.
Raise my children to inherit eternal life.
Raise my children to pass the course of their life in repentance.
Raise my children to labor to acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Raise my children to exert effort to attain the Kingdom of Heaven.
Raise my children to be written in the Book of Life.
Raise my children (names), O Christ, to be made worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven and make them heirs of eternal blessings.

***

Prelude 4
Having within a tempest of doubting thoughts and wanting my children to drink of eternal life, I weep. Remembering Your rich mercies, O God, I sing to Your Son with hope and with a contrite heart: Alleluia.

Song 4
I stretch out my hands and my heart towards Your loving-kindness, entreating that You will keep my children among Your servants and fulfill my petitions:
Raise my children in Your most holy inheritance.
Raise my children with all Your saints.
Raise my children to be Your servants, fulfilling all Your commands.
Raise my children to seek help from You alone.
Raise my children to inherit eternal life.
Raise my children (names), O Christ, to be made worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven and make them heirs of eternal blessings.

At the same time, having space for reflection without having to share my thoughts has allowed me to process them slowly, and since I’m a slow thinker, this has been a welcome relief. Simmering sometimes brings out a fuller flavor. (Sometimes, of course, it makes everything turn grey.)

One of the delights of my blogging break was that I got to read. A lot. Here are three of the highlights:

The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard

This mind-blowing book is going in my desert island trunk. I have learned more from this one book about spiritual disciplines than I have from all the others I’ve read put together. In part, I think it was a grace-of-the-right-book-at-the-right-time thing, but it’s also because Willard paints such a compelling portrait of what discipleship looks like, of the transformation that could be mine if I would put my hand to the plow and not look back. I’ve asked Doug to read it, and two weeks after finishing it, I’m starting it again. It’s that good.

The Good and Beautiful God by James Bryan Smith

Willard was Smith’s teacher and mentor, and I’m pretty sure reading this book is what prepared me to receive Willard’s book with such an open heart. I highly recommend this book for anyone who’s exhausted and in need of Jesus’ easy yoke. Smith’s disciplines include sleep and stillness and tea (or coffee, if that’s your beverage of choice).

The Prayer of Jabez by Bruce Wilkinson

I have long resisted reading this book; I was afraid it would promote a health-and-wealth gospel. How wrong I was. This little book voiced my nascent longing for my own life: that I would live—and live to the full—for the glory of God.

This trinity of books, read with time to ponder and meditate on them, may have changed my life. I see hopeful signs of it (more on that in another post, I hope), and I am praying that whatever good work God has begun in me through these books, he just keeps at it.

*****

I also got to read to my kids quite a bit. Here are a few of the books we read that I don’t think I’ve mentioned before.

With Luke and Ben (age 2)

The A to Z Picture Book by Gyo Fujikawa

Delightful illustrations with a wealth of words beginning with each letter of the alphabet. This is one to pore over again and again.

The Other Dog by Madeleine L’Engle, illus. Christine Davenier

When Touche’s master and mistress bring home another dog (one that wears diapers, no less!) Touche is unimpressed, to say the least. Not, perhaps, L’Engle’s best work, but still fun, especially if you can manage to read it with an English (or better yet, French) accent.

Baby-O by Nancy White Carlstrom, illus. Sucie Stevenson

Nancy is a poet, and this book is a colorful romp through a world of wonderful sounds as readers join an African family on market day.

Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss

Not for the faint of heart, this book of tongue-twisters gets ever twistier for your tongue as you progress through its pages. There are a Luke and a Ben in it, which may or may not be why my twins ask for it every couple of days. Maybe they just like hearing mama read about tweetle-poodle-beetle-noodle-bottle-paddle-battles.

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, illus. Clement Hurd

From the same duo who brought us Goodnight Moon comes this little allegory of the soul. Not to be missed.

Little Bear by Else Homelund Minarik, illus. Maurice Sendak

This was a staple of Jack and Jane’s literary diet before they outgrew it. Earlier this month, my twins sat through this whole book for the first time. They kept wanting “one more story” until before we knew it we’d read the whole thing. Yay!

Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins

When Rosie the hen goes for a walk, she unleashes all sorts of unintended mishaps on the not-so-wily fox who’s following her. Very fun.

Jack (9) and Jane (6):

Since we’re studying early American history right now, most of our reading has to do with that.

Exploration and Conquest: The Americas After Columbus: 1500-1620 by Betsy Maestro, illus. Guilio Maestro

This husband-wife team has written and illustrated half a dozen books about American history. Their American Story Series forms the spine of our study, providing the broad brush strokes of early American history within which we can set our other reading.

North American Indians by Marie and Douglas Gorsline and The Very First Americans by Cara Ashrose, illus. Bryna Waldman

Two short introductions to a number of Native American tribes from the Makah and Salish in our neck of the woods to the Hopi and Anazazi to the south and the Sioux, Seminole, Iriquois and Penobscot to the east. Jack wants to be Native American; when I remind him that he’s 1/8 Eskimo, he declares that he wants to live 400 years ago and hunt buffalo.

Pedro’s Journal by Pam Conrad

The fictitious journal of a ship’s boy on the Santa Maria during Columbus’s first voyage to “India.”

Walk the World’s Rim by Betty Baker

In 1527 a Spanish expedition set off from Cuba to explore Florida and the Gulf Coast. Of the 600 men who set out, only four survived, finding shelter and food with native tribes near what is now Galveston, Texas, in exchange for their services as medicine men. Betty Baker imagines their journey from Texas back to Mexico through the eyes of a young native boy who joins Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions on their walk along the world’s rim.

Jamestown: The Beginning by Elizabeth A. Campbell, illus. William Sauts Bock

Did you know that the Virginia Company of London sent three ships to start a New World settlement and didn’t bother to include a single farmer among the settlers? I know they were planning to find gold and silver and copper and whatnot, but what were they planning to do–eat it? In this and so many other ways, the expedition was an exercise in idiocy. That the settlement survived at all is, to my mind, a miracle. Fascinating stuff, this.

My favorite read-aloud of the past months has nothing to do with American history…

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, illus. by N.C. Wyeth

I never read Treasure Island as a kid, or a teenager, or an adult, so this was new territory for me. What a book! Besides the well-drawn characters and adventure-filled plot, it’s a treasure trove of new vocabulary words (color me happy). Also, just for the record, Captain Smollett is my hero.

There’s more. Always there’s more: so many books; so little time. But I’ll stop here. For now.

As a result of my research and writing last year, I signed up for International Justice Mission’s weekly prayer update. Every Thursday I’d get an email with a half dozen or so requests for their work around the world. I confess, I’d usually read through it and say a couple of yes, God’s or thank you Jesus’s before deleting the email.

In the intervening year, though, I’ve learned a lot more about the work that IJM does—and the prayer that undergirds it—and I’ve been stunned buy the stories I’ve heard and read of God’s providence and provision and care both for the justice workers and for the people on whose behalf they’re working. God really does answer prayer.

And that makes me want to pray more.

So, much to my surprise, my year of prayer—which I originally envisioned as being somehow about me—is turning out to not be about me at all. (Shocking, I know.) God is slowly calling me out of myself; calling me to pray beyond the borders of my small house, my big family; calling me to set aside my doubt and my questions for a few moments and just. pray.

In the past several months, I’ve become more intentional about praying over IJM’s requests. Thanks to my iPhone, I can read the email anywhere, so I recently started pulling up the IJM prayer requests whenever I’m standing in a line. This means I now pray over them multiple times each week—at the grocery store, the post office, my favorite coffee shop, even the library.

The more I pray, the more I want to pray. I confess that the cynic in me expects that this is just some sort of honeymoon phase. Yeah, I’m all gaga about Jesus and prayer right now, but it’ll fade. The rest of me hopes my inner cynic is wrong. I pray about that, too—that when my googoo eyes wear off, I’ll still love Jesus, still love prayer, and that if I don’t, I’ll still practice it anyway.

The funny thing about all this—at least to me—is that I am one of those people who’s always buried her head in the sand. I never wanted to know about the awful things happening in the world. I didn’t want to feel the pain of other’s suffering. I didn’t want to feel the guilt of not doing anything about it. And I certainly didn’t want to risk hearing God call me to some far-off place without indoor plumbing.

Yet here I am, eagerly awaiting the next prayer email from IJM, emails that frequently break my heart and make me weep for people I’ve never met. I’ve even started fantasizing about maybe going on a mission trip someday. How is this possible? Who is this person I’m becoming? I don’t know.

What I do know is that I want to do something about the horrors in this world, and prayer is doing something. As Bethany Hoang says, “for every follower of Christ, being obedient to God’s commands to justice is….a daily, on-the-ground, person-by-person work of prayer.” Prayer is the fundamental work of a Christian.

I don’t understand how prayer works any more than I did a year ago. But I’m starting to see that how it works is less important than that it works. And that my work is to stop thinking so much about prayer and actually pray.

Every Wednesday, my kids and I go to the local library. Every Wednesday my daughter heads straight for the Fairy Tales/Folk Tales/Mythology bays of the children’s section. She scans the spines of hundreds of books filled with beautiful princesses, ancient kings, gods of all shapes and sizes, and mythical creatures galore.

She has her favorites. Cinderella, of course, and Beauty and the Beast (particularly Jan Brett’s delightful version with its multiple visual subplots), and Rapunzel.

But she also has an appetite for dragons. Earlier this month, she came home with half a dozen dragon tales. Our family’s favorite is St. George and the Dragon, written in perfect prose by Margaret Hodges. Her story is based on Spenser’s tale of the Redcrosse Knight in The Faerie Queene and even includes snippets of Spenser’s poetry. Trina Schart Hyman won a much-deserved Caldecott for her lush and gorgeous illustrations. I can’t count how many times our family has checked this book out. I need to break down and just buy a copy.

One of my favorite stories about this particular book…

Read the rest (including a list of some of our family’s favorite dragon books) over at Tweetspeak Poetry, where they’re pondering dragons and other mythical beasts this month.

Photo by Sprague Minger.

It’s Easter. For another five glorious weeks it’s Easter. I love that the Easter season is so long. It goes on and on and on. N.T. Wright suggests that we balance the 40 days of Lenten fasting with 40 days of Easter adding. From Easter Sunday to Ascension, he says, we should take up, embrace, include, toss our spiritual hats in the air, and celebrate.

This year for Easter, I’m embracing two much-neglected practices in my life (I think they’re much neglected in almost every American’s life, but that’s beside the point): sleep and stillness.

Sleep

As the mother of four children aged 2 to 9, I am chronically tired. My kids have more energy in their pinky toes than I have in my whole body. I run out of energy long before the day runs out of hours, long before it’s time to put my kids to bed.

So for Easter, instead of forcing myself to just. keep. going, I’m stopping. When my kids go to bed, if I feel tired (and most of the time I do), I go to bed, too. When I put my 2-year-old boys down for a nap, if I feel tired, I let myself fall asleep with them, instead of making myself get up, fold laundry, do the dishes, check email, or whatever not-so-imperative thing I think I have to do.

I am giving myself the gift of sleep for Easter.

I am also giving myself the gift…

Read the rest over at Godspace.

The closest I’ve come to the astonishment of the disciples when they heard the good news of Jesus’ resurrection occurred the Easter my son was two. Jack’s Sunday School teacher had brought a huge bouquet of helium balloons and let each child choose one to take home. Jack chose red.

Proudly and joyfully, he carried his bobbing balloon down the church hallway to the Fellowship Hall, where Doug and I stopped to chat with our associate pastor, Steve, and his wife about our recent visit to Steve’s hometown. A few minutes into our conversation, Jack let out a piercing wail. He had let go of his balloon, and it floated to the top of the Fellowship Hall, some 12 feet above our heads…

Read the rest over at A Deeper Church.

In mid-February, my friend Susan gave me my first ever icon. It’s of Mary, the Theotokos, or God-bearer. The child Jesus leans against her cheek, one arm around her neck, the other resting on her chest, just above her left breast. His eyes look up at her in love; her eyes look out of the icon, at the viewer, at me.

I hung the icon on the east wall of my bedroom, above my writing desk, next to the window. Every afternoon, when I lie down on my bed with my two-year-old twins, to put them (and myself) down for a nap, I can see Mary looking at me with pity and compassion and love.

I need that kind of look these days. I’ve been worn out, worn down, just worn, like an old sheet that’s been washed way too many times. When I get this tired, the nasty voices in my head, which I can usually fight or keep at bay with prayer and Scripture recitation, get really loud and insistent, and in all their clamoring, I start to listen to them.

They say, Jesus never yelled at his disciples, and they bring to mind the way, earlier today, I …

Read the rest over at Godspace.

Dear friends,

Here in the middle of Lent, I find myself exhausted and shattered. I look in the mirror, and I see…ugly. It’s deeper than my cracked and blemished skin. It’s my cracked and blemished soul; it’s the words that rise up from that broken place within that have broken me these past weeks.

For Lent, I embraced the practice of speaking only kind words, only true words. I knew it would be hard. I had no clue how hard. Every day, I have failed. Every hour of every day, except when I’m sleeping, I have failed. And even when my words are okay, my tone is not. It cuts—and I’m the one who’s bleeding most.

As I struggle my way through this Lenten practice of watching my tongue, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to write. Perhaps that’s because of this practice; or perhaps it’s because I feel tired and tattered; or perhaps it’s simply because I am giving so much all the time (there are these four kids in my life, after all, and they need me), and I am depleted.

Whatever the reason, I am going to take these next weeks to sit with my thoughts and with God without any pressure to publish. I am, in other words, taking a break from blogging. A long one: until Pentecost. It scares me, for many reasons, this letting go of my blog for so long, but that’s partly why I feel it’s the right thing to do. At the very least, it feels like something I need to do. To let myself rest and read and write without having to write anything decent, let alone good.

I want to say a deep and heartfelt thank you to each of you who visit my site each week. That you would spend time reading what I write—this is a gift to me. You are the reason I have hung on here as long as I have. Thank you.

With deepest gratitude,
Kimberlee

P.S. I have commitments to other sites each month (Godspace, A Deeper Church, and Tweetspeak Poetry), and I will continue to uphold those, so if you really want to, you can catch up with me there. I may or may not crosspost those links from here when they go live, but at the very least I’ll retweet or share them on Twitter and Facebook.

My twins are napping, my oldest is at the pool, swimming with a friend, and my daughter and I are sharing a rare moment of just-the-two-of-us time. I make tea, while she sets out teacups and saucers, bread and jam. When the tea has steeped, I pour it into our cups, and we sit together, talking a little between sips of tea and bites of jammy bread. The late afternoon sun slants through the dining room window, falling across the table, across the tea tray, onto Jane’s dress.

It is a moment of no import. Once it has passed, I forget all about it—until days later when I meet with my spiritual director, and she asks me where God has met me this past month. We sit in silence as I wait for God to speak, to reveal to me His presence in my life these past weeks. And the image that comes to mind is of Jane and me, sitting at the dining room table, drinking tea. In my mind’s eye, the sunlight streaming into the room seems to be the very presence of God.

Read the rest over at Godspace.

But now that I do, I want to shout it from the rooftops: Listen up, everybody! Put down that remote control! Put down your iPad! Turn off the iPod! Silence your smart phone and chuck it in a drawer!

Now, go get a child or two. It doesn’t matter if they’re four months or fourteen years old. Plop them onto the nearest sofa. Find a book. You know, those old-fashioned rectangles of bound paper. Pick it up. Open it up. Sit on the sofa next to the children you’ve plopped there. Read them the book.

Rinse. Repeat.

*****

According to Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, “every time we read to a child, we’re sending a pleasure message to the child’s brain.” Neuroscientist John Medina calls this a “dopamine lollipop.” The brain likes dopamine lollipops; when it gets one, it wants more of whatever stimulus caused it. So reading aloud to your children creates in their little brains a desire to…

Read the rest over at Tweetspeak Poetry.