When We Pray For Dying Children

Last night when I couldn’t sleep, I got up to walk around the house for a few minutes before getting back into bed. I could hear the breathing rhythms of all four men in my house– my two boys, my husband, and our old husky who sleeps at the foot of the bed.

It’s been weighing heavily on me, news time and again that toddlers drown in a giant ocean, alone and afraid. They’ve left their homes with nothing but their families, and they die with those few things, and my mother-heart cannot comprehend that.

How do we pray for things we cannot possibly comprehend?

Sometimes prayer is tangible, words to heal body parts and minds and souls, questions that are particular and honest.

But other times, prayer is a mist, a cloud covering over something we couldn’t even hope to understand. That’s the kind of prayer I prayed last night and I pray today. It’s entering into something I don’t comprehend to ask questions I don’t know how to ask in hopes that the Spirit of God will know exactly what’s to be done.

I cannot cope with what is tangible about losing a baby to the ocean or to starvation, so I lean into Mystery, a presence that somehow knows and understands.

Yesterday when we visited the river, I walked along a canopied path alone for a few minutes. I found a black and blue dragonfly there, and she seemed to be playing with me. She’d flit from leaf to leaf, watching me watch her.

She is a symbol of hope, a symbol of transformation, a symbol that reminds us that water is nearby, that we can drink and be taken care of, revived and refreshed.

I held that inside of me as I watched her, and then I walked back to my boys.

How can we hold hope and terror together in the same spaces? They’re beyond my comprehension, beyond my ability to grasp, and so prayers sound a lot more like unsteady breaths than strung out sentences.

But in my breathing, I hold those children and their mothers and fathers inside of me as best I can. Who says I am more alive than they are alive, more valuable than they have value?

Who says I am more capable of human emotions and beliefs than they are capable, more brave than they are brave?

These are waking-up prayers, prayers of rescuing myself out of my tunneled vision, out of my own nation, my own tribe, my own ability to understand grief.

So I lean into this praying, into that sense that we groan and the Spirit knows what’s happening anyway. We pray wordless prayers and God still knows what we hope for.

I still hope that the world can find transformation from war to peace, from fear to comfort, from individualistic living to communal.

I hold this as I pray, watch it slowly take shape over the years, watch it like I watched the dragonfly prance.

And I hold the words of Jesus over all those children, Jesus, who calmed storms and welcomed friends with words that undid every broken thing: “Peace be with you.”

Peace be with you.