Praying for the Relative Who Left the Faith Behind

The relative who left

You know the one. Maybe it's your son who stopped coming to church the year he left for university and never started again. Maybe it's a sister who says she's done with God, done with church, done with all of it, and says it flatly, like a fact and not a wound. Maybe it's a friend of thirty years who used to pray with you and now changes the subject fast when it comes up.

You want to pray for them. You also feel strange doing it, because you cannot ask God to make them believe the way you ask God to help with a job interview. It isn't that simple a request, and some part of you already knows that praying wrongly here could do harm, not good. So you hesitate. This is for that hesitation.

What to actually ask for

Start smaller than you think you need to. Not "bring them back," not "show them the truth," at least not as the whole of it. Those requests put you in charge of an outcome that was never yours to manage, and they can turn a relationship into a project.

Ask instead for things you can actually picture. That the next conversation between you doesn't end in a slammed door. That you'll have the patience to listen without interrupting with a correction. That they'll have people in their life, whoever those people are, who are kind to them. That whatever is underneath the leaving, and there is almost always something underneath it, gets named eventually, even if not to you.

Ask for peace between you, specifically. Not agreement. Peace.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God.

Matthew 5:9

That's not a request that they come around to your view. It's a request that you could stand being the kind of person who keeps the door open rather than the one who keeps score. That's a prayer you can pray honestly even on a day when you're furious with them.

There's an old story about this that isn't about faith at all but about a long estrangement. Jacob had wronged his brother Esau badly enough that he fled for his life and stayed away for years. When he finally went back, he had no idea whether Esau would kill him or embrace him. He sent gifts ahead. He bowed low. He prepared everything he could prepare. And then:

And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept.