Christal Cooper
Article 547 Words
Guest Blogger Steve
Wickham
A Father’s Prayer
Our Gracious God
Father, Son, Holy Spirit; our
Rock, our Salvation, our Hope; our God, our Lord, our Comforter;
we bless You as You bless us with goodness and power and
provision. You are our Everything; Father, our covenant
Parent who loves us so unconditionally. We give You our
heartfelt praise for all that You are!
Lord, we want to honour our
fathers for Father’s Day. We bring our fathers before You and
thank You for the strength, time and energy they have for
their children, and for their fatherly wisdom. We bless our dads
in the name of Jesus, for their most sacred of ministries —
to their family — a godly work.
But that’s not all, Lord. Some of
us — if we are honest — are sad, some of us are angry, and
some of us feel wretched when it comes to our fathers. Help
those of us in this place even as we pray this prayer.
We want to pray for those who are
sad on Father’s Day; for those who have lost their fathers
and miss them terribly even though, and especially if, there
may be so many great memories of past. Help those of
us in this place be gentle with ourselves.
We pray for those fathers who
have experienced the grief of loss; who have lost a child; a
pain that ever lingers in sorrow like sea billows that roll. Bless
these fathers with a hope. We thank You, Lord, that You hold
these children until the day You have appointed when these fathers might finally be reconciled
with their little ones and older children in heaven. We pray also for the dads
here, Lord Jesus, who won’t have or don’t have children, and we pray into their
sadness, of that ambiguous loss — an incomprehensible grief — the loss of a
dream. Help them be fathers in other ways. Stretch out within them a hope for expressing their fatherly heart.
We pray Your grace be over these
people in their longing, for exactly where they are this
moment. Be the God of comfort and peace for each of them this
day and all days. We ask that You walk with them and be inside
them with power by Your Spirit.
We must recognise those also,
Lord, whose fathers let them down — when memories of pain and
perhaps memories of abuse or neglect emerge for thought
of Father’s Day — fathers who defaulted on the
task; who weren’t there for them as fathers should be. We also
pray into the guilt fathers might carry; guilt that is able to be
reconciled at the cross — and take them there, we pray. We pray
that Your Spirit would draw all these people aside and provide the way to forgiveness, healing, restoration and wholeness. And, in honest, we thank You that without our fathers we would not be. Help those, Lord, who have scant meaning for life. Help them know their value for being here.
We pray for those fathers, and
for those children, who are far from each other right now; that
You would stir within them love that transcends distance and
overcomes the limitations of space and time. Create a yearning
for and an actuation of closeness.
Finally, we pray for our new fathers
and those expecting their first child; that You would bless
them with every confidence of capacity, knowing with peace
that they have been called by You, to be a father — with
mothers, the most sacred of human roles.
We lift our fathers before You,
Father, that through Your Holy Spirit You would encourage;
that as they give their sacrifices of provision and
strength — in their devotion to care for and be there for their
children — that You would continue to equip them for the tasks of today and the fathering ahead of them, and to empower them to be all they can be for their children and families, and
give to them the energy, strength, and confidence they
need.
We pray all these things as a
requiem of praise for our Fathers, in and through the name
of Jesus... AMEN.
*Steve Wickham is a Baptist Pastor who holds Degrees in Science, Divinity, and Counseling. He lives in Pert, Western Australia with his
wife and children.
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