Still Praying for the Grown Child You Can't Help

Your phone has been quiet for three days, or it rings and you brace before you pick up. The trouble is not something you can fix with a phone call or a check or a lecture you have already given twice. Somewhere along the way your child became an adult, with their own choices and their own consequences, and the thing you are praying about is on the other side of a door you no longer hold the key to.

This is the particular ache of praying for a grown child. You are not the one who can pick them up anymore. And most of what you want to pray, if you are honest, is not really a prayer. It is a plan for how God should fix them, and fix them your way.

When help stops being yours to give

Even Mary and Joseph lost track of their son for three days once. He was twelve, old enough to have his own ideas about where he belonged, and when they found him he was not where they expected and not sorry in the way they expected either.

And when they saw him, they were astonished; and his mother said unto him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I sought thee sorrowing. And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? knew ye not that I must be in my Father’s house? And they understood not the saying which he spake unto them.

Luke 2:48-50

They did not understand it. Luke does not pretend they did. Mary did not get an explanation that satisfied her, and the passage does not say she stopped worrying, only that she kept turning it over in her heart. That is a strange and honest thing for a Gospel to admit: even a mother who had every reason to trust how this child's life would go still had to carry something unresolved. If Mary did not get a tidy answer, you are not failing by not having one either.

If your grown child is in real danger, this piece is not a substitute for calling someone who can actually intervene, a doctor, a crisis line, the police, a lawyer. Prayer sits alongside that, not instead of it.

What you can actually ask for

Ask for what is theirs to receive, not what is yours to extract. Ask that they would be kept physically safe tonight. Ask that there would be at least one honest person near them who tells them the truth. Ask that they would not be alone in whatever this is, even if you cannot be the one who is with them.

But Zion said, Jehovah hath forsaken me, and the Lord hath forgotten me. Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, these may forget, yet will not I forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.