Replacing Worry with Vision

In her devotional today over at Proverbs 31 Ministries, Glynnis Whitwer made this statement that interrupted my day and made me stop and pray:

It didn't take a detailed self-assessment to realize I'd reduced my prayers to the common denominator of safety. While that is critically important, I realized I had replaced my vision for their futures with worry about their presents.

My children are at critical places in their lives.

I have a high school boy who will be faced with choices that could have lasting consequences for the rest of his life. He will see things in the world that I have protected him from his entire life. His heart, deceitful above all things, will try to lead him astray. The Holy Spirit will be more important now to him than ever before.

I have a daughter who is making day to day decisions not as one who is wise, but one full of folly. Proverbs has much to say about this direction of person -- especially that of a woman child. Will she choose contention or will she choose to be a builder? Will she wreak destruction and havoc or will she choose to have a servant's heart, live to build another up and not tear them down?

God can handle their safety, their security, in any given day. He can handle all of the rest, too. But my prayers for the vision that God placed in my heart for them on the day they were born can't fall by the wayside in order for me to fight fires that perhaps are created by my own lack of trust and worry.

So I'm asking God to renew in me a sense of His presence in the lives of my children. I'm asking Him to show me again the vision that He gave me for their lives and draw me to fall to my knees and ask Him for THAT.

I can certainly trust God to guard my children, protect them and to guide their footsteps perhaps even if I forget to ask on any given day. But let my prayerful ferver everyday be well spent on asking God for the things that have eternal meaning in their lives -- that He will develop godly character in them, replace folly with wisdom in their hearts, make them hardworking as unto the Lord, give them spiritual discernment so that they will know what the will of God is and do it, give them practical discernment so they will see the wrong path before them and choose another way, and that He will make them people who listen for the voice of God and obey it.

Replacing worry for today with vision for their entire journey.

Blessings,
Dori