Want to learn how to pray? Have kids. Nothing will get you in practice faster.
I will never forget the gray Maundy Thursday when our two sons, Timothy and William, were four and seven. I came back to the Guideposts offices that afternoon from a dentist appointment. The message light on my phone was blinking. Voicemails from my wife, Carol. With each one she sounded more frantic.
The first: “Tim’s been in an accident at nursery school. It sounds like he broke something. I’ll let you know.” The next: “We’re heading to the doctor’s office. It’s his leg.” Then a third: “The doctor sent us to the X-ray lab on Fifty-ninth Street. Can you meet us there?” (Obviously this was before cell phones.)
I told my colleagues what was up and left a quick message at church. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sing at the service tonight,” I said to our choir director. “I think Timothy broke his leg.”
The X-ray lab was in a dreary building near St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. I was directed to pediatrics on the tenth floor. No sign of Carol and Tim. “Were they here?” I asked. No record of them in the system, said the receptionist.
I called the doctor’s office. No response. I called my office to see if Carol had called again—all these calls made from a payphone. Finally I played back a voicemail from Carol: “Hi, it’s me. We’re at the Hospital for Joint Diseases down on East Seventeenth.”
I considered taking a cab, but now it was rush hour and the subway would be faster. The A train to the L train. At the hospital I asked for Pediatrics. Someone sent me to the thirteenth floor. I stepped out of the elevator and into the conversation of two doctors.
“It’s the worst break I’ve ever seen on a kid,” one said, shaking his head. “Right through his femur. He got hit by a tricycle.”
Were they talking about my son? The worst break he’d ever seen on a kid? Not for nothing do they have signs in hospitals urging staff not to talk about patients in public places!
“Could you tell me where the pediatric X-ray lab is?” I asked, trying not to panic.
“Downstairs, on three.”
Finally I found Timothy and Carol, Tim looking small and shocked. He was shaking. Carol explained: There had been an accident at nursery school. Some kid ran into him with a tricycle.
“That’s what a doctor upstairs was saying,” I replied.
The X-rays showed the break was in his femur, the thigh bone, a big one to heal. Carol, keeping her voice measured, not wanting to alarm Tim, said to me, “The doctors say he has to be in traction for twenty-seven days.”
“But he can be home, right?”
“No, he has to be in traction here at the hospital.”
A four-year-old in traction in a hospital bed for 27 days? This sounded worse than being stuck on an airplane for 27 days with a toddler, desperately trying to entertain him. Frightening. Unthinkable. How would we handle it?
I spent that first night with Timothy. He lay on his back, his leg hoisted in the air by a pulley and weights. The rails of his bed seemed more like bars on a jail cell. The parents of the kid in the next bed were watching a shoot-em-up cop movie on TV. It was impossible to sleep, let alone pray.
“Daddy, we’re stuck,” Tim said, grabbing the bars. “You’ll be okay, honey,” I said. If only I could believe it. Tim’s words echoed in my head: We’re stuck, we’re stuck, we’re stuck.
That night, sitting in a chair next to my son’s hospital bed, I entered one of those ordeals that every parent faces at some point. Your child is suffering and you can’t make things right, can’t relieve their pain. All you can do is ask God for help.
Never had I felt so helpless. Never had my faith felt so weak. Jesus could have been standing there in a hospital gown and I wouldn’t have seen him. The only word I could pray was “No.”
What I have come to recognize is that this moment of utmost helplessness is when prayer works hardest. When you have no other avenues to turn to, you stop trying to fix things. You give up control. You accept your powerlessness. You become most willing to let God take over.
And it is the peculiar position parents are thrust into again and again, as though God has to remind us again and again that our children are borrowed blessings. We do all we can to love them, nourish them, give them stability and security, but in the end they are out of our control.
We got through those 27 days the way you get through any crisis. With the help of family, friends, colleagues and tons of prayers. My mom came out to help for a week, Dad for another. Carol and I spent alternating nights at the hospital with Tim and at home with Will.
Oh, did I mention that William came down with chicken pox the next day, Good Friday, or that Timothy also got the chicken pox, which blessedly meant he was given a private room at the hospital?
Finally on a luminous April day, I rode home with Timothy in the back of an ambulance. “Daddy,” he exclaimed, looking out the window at the blooming cherry trees, “it’s so beautiful! I knew it would be beautiful, but I didn’t expect it would be as beautiful as this.”
Tim is now 22, a recent college grad, and his older brother is 25. Were there other times when we had to give up and trust God to look after them? Goodness, yes. Countless times—the disappointments we couldn’t shield them from, the mistakes we couldn’t prevent, the heartbreaks we couldn’t stop.
And those were the struggles we knew of. They are smart, capable adults, but will I ever stop praying for them? I don’t think so.
Years ago the writer Catherine Marshall described families as “God’s schoolroom,” a phrase Carol and I have often quoted to each other. Kids remind you how little you know and how much you have to learn—not just about them but also about faith and trust.
But for all those times I’ve said, “God, you’re going to have to help me here,” there are moments when I’ve had to echo Timothy in that ambulance saying, “It’s beautiful. I never expected it would be as beautiful as this.” That’s parenthood.
Read an excerpt from Rick’s book, 10 Prayers You Can’t Live Without.
Download your FREE ebook, A Prayer for Every Need, by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale
