Pray

Pray the mean girls stop being mean. Pray no one gets left out of the games or the parties. Pray the teachers light fires in all the right places. Pray that they remember to be just as kind and as brave as you know they are. Pray the scary new stuff really will lead to all the wonder you know it can. Pray their wings are dry and ready to fly.

I'm awake when I should be long asleep. Thinking about chairs to set up in seminary in the morning. Thinking about CE's mission call burning a hole under my mattress, away from the pesky fingers and prying eyes of younger brothers till she can come home from BYU to open it this weekend. Thinking about this crazy thing of self reliance. We teach our children to be self reliant, to grow and to want to be independent, to want to serve and love and teach, because they love God and He asks. We teach our children these things and then they have the audacity to actually go and do it.

At each step of this parenting, I have been blessed and forced to entrust some part of my children's care and keeping to others. To teachers and leaders and friends and, increasingly, to strangers. I am so grateful for the lessons and love my children have at the hands of others because they learn things that I could not teach them. I am less grateful for the hard knocks they have at the hands of others, but similarly pray that my children and I aren't responsible for too many hard knocks for anyone else.

I find myself praying and worrying over a whole new group of children I have inherited with seminary. I see their faces in my mind throughout the day. I worry over them and pray over them, fretting about their absences, hoping the tools I bring to them in class will be enough to slay their demons, to lead them to peace.

Seminary is a different type of gospel teaching than I have ever done. It's daunting enough to teach a class. I have taught gospel classes before. Seminary requires that I teach individuals in a much more pointed way than I have ever taught before. 42 students in my class. 42 different sets of needs and hopes and problems and levels of gospel understanding. 42 different sets of parents with their different levels of support and understanding. With all these faces wandering through my mind, I suppose it's a wonder I ever sleep at all.

All the things I pray for my children, I find myself praying for my seminary children. And all the things I have prayed and taught and hoped for CE, she is doing, in increasingly wide and awe-inspiring circles, she is doing.

Pray I've given the right tools, that I've taught the right lessons. Pray her wings are dry and ready to fly.