Family Intercessions of Love

Whatever we think about our familial relationships, we cannot help interceding for them in our thoughts and therefore prayers. God hears them all.

Prayer makes for reality in ways we don’t even often realise. Most Christians think they don’t pray nearly enough, but is it perhaps that God hears every single concerned thought and discerns them as prayers?

Do we also perhaps live a life that is foolproof in these ways? Simply put, the love and devotion we have for our families, or the pains we continue to endure because of them, is felt intrinsically by the Lord of Glory—the King of Creation.

Resting Easier

Just the simple fact of knowing God’s there and approving every concerned and worriedly prayerful thought is enough—despite our pain—to breathe easier.

From the beginning we were designed to know peace and joy and grace, that these portents were qualities God shaped for us, and to realise that everything of life—and particularly family—was to be a cherished blessing. We know the Fall destroyed the magnanimity of that vision, but we still have the majority of it preserved in God.

From the ideal to the real to now the realised whole, we can find in family the object of our passions and the stanzas of love we always wished for. There is peace in the fact that our families push us, conform us, inspire and rile us. And still we’re there for them, and them for us.

It’s an awkward ease we can feel; it’s because we care.

Improving Our Relationships Through Intercession

As we prayerfully think about our familial situations and come to be thankful for them—whether they bless us or not—we come into a different arrangement with them, one that comes from within our hearts. It is something that has not much to do with them. These extra portions of deep thought project for us something that occurs deeper below even than our own consciousness.

We begin to love longer, better, wider and deeper than perhaps we were capable of beforehand. Our prayers are blessed of God for they’ve reached our hearts and we’re being changed and transformed.

It is simply wonderful to know this experience and to nurture it.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.