SubscribePray at 3 p.m. for 30 days for our children
Something has got to change. And it has got to be us. Our children need us. They need our fervent prayers and our active involvement in their lives. They need their mothers, aunties, sisters and female cousins and friends to nurture them into wholeness and to help keep them away from paths that lead to their destruction. They need their fathers, uncles, brothers and male cousins and friends to encourage them, uphold them and them show the way to living godly, purposeful lives. Our African American children need us.
Even if you do not have any children to call your own, the children in your church, your neighborhood, on the subway you ride, that you encounter in the supermarket need to know that there is someone who cares or can care about them. This can be tricky, I know, after observing this week a young girl drape her leg over a subway seat almost defying someone to sit next to her and another playing her music so loud as if to annoy.
Unfortunately, too many of our young girls and boys are acting as if their lives are like throw-away candy wrappers. And too many of us see them as litter on the street. I’ve seen the scowls of disapproval on some adult faces as they encounter sulking girls or pass congregating groups of boys, and I’ve felt the scowl inch onto my own face.
Something has got to change. Consider this newly released report from the Schott Foundation that says that our public schools are failing nearly half of the country’s black male students.
“Taken together, the numbers in the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s report form a nightmarish picture―one that is all the more frightening for being both true and long-standing,” said Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, who provided the foreword in the report. “These boys are failing, but I believe that it is the responsibility of the adults around them to turn these trajectories around. All of us must ensure that we level the playing field for the hundreds of thousands of children who are at risk of continuing the cycle of generational poverty. The key to success is EDUCATION.” (Photo of Canada applauding a student’s achievement is from the Harlem Children’s Zone website.)
Consider this broadcast report from NBC news correspondent Lester Holt, which aired Sunday on DATELINE NBC about the gang and gun violence in Chicago that has become a centerpiece for kids killing kids. The parents of a 16-year-old college-bound young man, Blair Holt, who died in the cross-fires of a gang shooting on a city bus are standing up against gun violence. They started a group with other parents called Purpose on Pain and are advocating an end to gun violence. Here is Annette Nance-Holt’s story about how gun violence caused her son’s death and changed her life.
Consider this news story two weeks ago in which 70 young people in Washington, D.C., stunned the city by fighting one Friday night on the otherwise relatively violence-free Metro. Seventy kids. What were they thinking! Fortunately, no guns or knives were involved and only four people required medical treatment.
The young people who need our help are not just kids who have grown up undisciplined and having to fend for themselves from young ages. Or those who never knew their father’s love or felt a mother’s embrace, or those who live in poverty and neglect. All our children–the ones who are trying their best to make right decisions and those who don’t seem to be able to– need our unfailing love, attention and support.
Recently when my son, who made it through high school and was in college, stood before a judge, she looked directly at my husband and me sitting in the courtroom. “I’m talking to the parents right now,” she began. She said increasingly she is seeing boys younger than my son from good homes coming before her. They are doing stupid things, she said, but the consequences can be grave.
Most of us are or at least try to be good parents, doing the right things for our children. I know I have tried and will continue to try. And yet, as I look at this current generation, I can see that more has to be done for all of our youth.
I’ll talk more about this in other blogs and solicit suggestions for what we can do and what is being done to reverse the direction of some of our boys and girls. As Lester Holt and the Schott Foundation both pointed out, some good efforts are being made to help young people survive and thrive in this society.
In the meantime, please join me in praying a special prayer for our children during the next 30 days, everyday at 3 p.m.
Pray as the Spirit leads you for the children in your home, your family, your neighborhood, your church, and your children’s schools. Include praying for God’s protection, direction and revelation over their lives.
Pray for a movement of God unlike any we have ever seen before so that this generation of young people will live up to their godly inheritance.
James 5:13 tells us and I believe it: “The earnest prayers of a righteous person have great power and produces wonderful results.” NLT
Let me know if you will join this prayer effort.
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