6 Months of Back to School Prayers for My Children

I woke up with butterflies in my stomach. I hadn’t slept well the night before, mainly due to nervousness. I didn’t want to eat breakfast. I was unsure of how the day would go. Would the teacher be understanding? Would the other kids be nice? What if I forgot something?

It was my daughter’s first day of school, and, though I would never let her know, I was just as anxious about the day as she was. Letting her go to spend all day without me has never been easy. I want her to make right choices. I want her to get along with her classmates. I want her teacher to understand that, sometimes, our house (with triplets and a recently sick child and parents who have multiple jobs) is stressful sometimes. I want my daughter to be nice and have a joyful spirit.

But, the truth is, I am not in control of any of these things. And the control freak in me goes crazy.

This year, God has been speaking to me about prayer. I’ve been making more efforts than ever to spend time in prayer with Him each day, and not just in generic prayer, but in specific prayer, for specific people and specific situations. It was on my daughter’s first day of school this year that God reminded me that prayer was exactly what I needed in this situation, too.

I wanted my prayers for her to be more than the much recited, “God, please help her to have a good day today.” I wanted them to be directional. I wanted them to be not only for her, but for those peers and teachers with whom she would interact each day.

God laid it on my heart to write out intentional prayers. This mini booklet of 6 months of Back to School Prayers for My Children is the result.

 

I’m happy to be sharing it with you today. On each month, you’ll find four weeks with five prayer topics per week. Schools begin at different times, making it difficult for me to pinpoint an exact starting day, so I began it on a Monday at the first of the month. Do not feel as if you must legalistically quote the prayers and call it a day. Rather, these are meant to be topics for you to prayerfully bathe your children, their friends, their teachers, and their administrators. The way that the prayer is shaped will be different for each child and each age. For instance, on the day where I pray that my daughter will “have discernment,” the prayer may be shaped differently for her than it would if I were praying for a 16 year old. That is the beauty of prayer and God’s word. It is applicable to us, no matter what stage that we are in life!

 

Elementary school is just the beginning of my journey in letting go. I am glad that I can pray for my child even when I cannot be with her.

 

To access the 6 months of Back to School Prayer Printables, right click the images below. Download them to your computer, and then print them with you computer software. They are designed in an 8×10 size, so they will fit on an 8.5×11 sheet of paper each. It is best to not “resize them to fill page.” Since the paper is a 8×10 format, the words may be a bit blurry if you try to stretch them out to fill the whole page. There are 6 sheets with 6 months, as well as a cover sheet should you choose to make it into a booklet. I realize that most kids have more than 6 months of school! Simply start over again or pick out your favorite prayer topics to finish up the school year.