Potential Adoptive Parent's Prayer

Dear Heavenly Father,

Thank you for the desire you have placed in our hearts to give a home to some of your children. Thank you for the beautiful home that you are helping us to create, and may it be a haven of love and comfort to the children you share with us. Father, if this is not your will, and if we will not do it well, then please use your power to stop it now. We do not wish to cause harm. We wish to bring peace. If we have the strength within us to be the kind of parents needed for someone out there, then please use your power to bring us together. Help us find the right children, Lord -- the ones we can touch and raise and share your love with. The ones we can meld and mold; the ones you have saved from an unimaginable life to a life everyone dreams of -- life with a family who loves and supports you unconditionally. Holy God, give us strength to do the things that need doing to make our life safe and nurturing for the children you have planned for us. Keep our hearts pure so that all the honor and glory for this incredible blessing goes to you. Give us patience, Father, and help us be the kind of parents you are to us. Help us be strong, consistent, supportive, loving. Help us be wise, comforting, nurturing. Help us to discipline them in ways that will benefit them the most. Help us teach them all the things that matter. Help us always to hold up Your light as the one they need. Help it shine brightly Father, through all the chaos they have known so far. Be with our children, who are waiting, somewhere, for parents like us. And Father, though I recognize it may take many hard days and weeks and months and years, I pray that you knit us together as a family -- with bonds that can never be broken. Give us strength and grace and forgiveness when we make mistakes and help us to admit them and move forward with a better tomorrow than today. Bless their hearts, Father God and keep them fertile and fresh and soft and malleable. Plant the seed of your love in their hearts, and help us to water and fertilize and cultivate and give these children back to you one day as hearty vines bearing fruit for you. And help us realize that every good and perfect gift comes from you -- and to be thankful for that gift even on the hard days. Be with all those who will touch our application and visit our home and help us choose children that are right for our family. Guide them with your wisdom and give them your spirit to help things work out for the good of all. And Father, if it is not in your will for us to be parents, then please give us the strength to bear the sadness and to continue to love all the children you place in our path without murmuring or complaining. Your will be served, and help us to always honor you with our mouths, our deeds, and our lives. Bless the waiting children, bless our waiting hearts.

Through Jesus' power,
Amen