Welcome to Day One of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “The Aching Void of an Absent Parent

“Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close.’”

• Psalm 27:10

There are many things that are meant to be forever. There are those things whose permanence in our lives is never questioned because they are designed to be permanent. Their role in our lives had nothing of a temporary nature built into them. Therefore, we have no reason to doubt their permanence. As such, we never stop to consider what life would be like without them because such a thought is entirely at odds with their permanence. Yet, we live in a world where permanence can be traded for lesser agendas and what should never have left us does.

When a parent abandons us, the immense internal conflict of their supposed permanence as held in juxtaposition against their absence rocks our world to dark places. In our desperate efforts to correlate the irreconcilable discrepancies of permanence as held against abandonment, we rationalize the loss of the parent or we work to suppress the pain by denying the loss altogether. We work to believe that this might be better anyway, or that they were going to leave sooner or later, or that they needed their space to live their lives. Yet we soon discover that no rationalization is ever big enough or convincing enough to release someone of a commitment for which there is no release.

And in the desperation of times like these we begin to realize that we’ve turned to God because He has remained permanent. It is His permanence that becomes our sure refuge. Our sense of stability arises from His stability. Our ability to somehow craft a future empty of a parent that should have been part of that crafting is centered on the fact that God is a certain part of that future as much as He is a part of the present that is shaping that future. And we have the certainty that He will never abandon us in either.

The Quote for Today Is This:

“At the point that I can look into my children’s faces and say that my life is about their lives, I have finally come to the point that I can now start becoming a parent. And if I’ve not reached this point, I might be a parent by birth but it all ends there..”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

Today’s Prayer

Dear God:

I am lonely. The people that were supposed to be here…are not. You know the reasons that they’ve left, and You know the hole within me that their departure has created. You know how dark this hole is and how impossible it feels that it will ever be filled. You also know the hole within them that caused them to leave. You know that the hole within them will never be filled by their choices. And You know that even though the hole within them and the hole within me are very different, they are both in desperate need of healing.

And so, I’m asking You to fill the hole within both of us. You know that it’s hard for me to pray for the hole within them, but I know that for myself to heal in the way that I want to heal I must pray for their healing as well. They ran ‘to’ something because they were running ‘from’ something. Help them stop the running and start the healing.

Dear God, I believe that You can do more than just fill the hole. You said that you will “supply all [my] need according to [Your] riches in glory by Christ Jesus.” This need is big. It’s bigger than any collection of words could ever hope to explain. But You are bigger. So, I’m counting on You to fill this hole, heal it, and use this experience to grow me, deepen me, better root me in you, and position me to reach others for You in ways that I could not have done so were it not for this hole.

I pray all of this in Jesus’ Name. Amen.

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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Have a great day!