About ten years ago – maybe a little less –  I watched as a plane took off from Tampa International Airport. On that plane was my second son David, a freshman in high school, off on a spring break school trip to Paris.
It was the first time in 18 or so years of parenting that I had felt so absolutely helpless in regard to one of my children. It became so clear to me at that moment – children are not possessions or extensions of ourselves. They are who th

ey are, God’s children, off on their own paths, listening to the voice of God in their own hearts (we hope), and there are limits to what we can do for them.
As the plane soared east, I realized I’d hit that limit.
And so I prayed. That day, I started to understand some things about prayer, too. Like most people, I had wondered about the lives of cloistered, contemplative religious. How could anyone pray so much?
The older I get, the more obvious to the answer to that question is. Not only are the riches and depths of God unfathomable, an eternal sea of joyful, intriguing mystery, but so are the problems of his children.
There are days that I fully understand how someone could pray all day and still feel as if they are not finished.
As I said, it is a little less than a decade later, and today David takes off in another plane, again heading east.
He’s going from Dulles to Frankfort and then to Rome. He’ll be in Rome for a month, taking a certification/training program in teaching English as a foreign language and then, his plan (and next plane reservation) says he’ll continue east with a layover in Qatar and then to Saigon for a year or so, maybe more, depending on what life hands him, where he senses he’s being led.
Every day, sons and daughters go out the door and down the road. Some go into real, obvious, very clear danger zones.  But even those whose destinations seem safe and straight-ahead find roadbumps and worse because that is just life.  So what do the mothers and fathers pray? Protect him. Yes. The same prayer we’ve uttered since we felt the first flutter within. But as we get older, and they do to, we understand what can be guarded against and what can’t, and we understand, so painfully and unwillingly, that difficulty and suffering will come to them, even as much as we wish that it doesn’t, that we would wish for it to be visited on ourselves instead.
So the prayer changes a bit. Protect him, still, yes indeed. But after that, a sigh, and in a deeper, more realistic hope, we pray again:  Help him be ready for whatever. Help him see You in all of it and be at peace.
Amen.
(Photo taken in Knoxville this past weekend. Four out of the five. The fifth (or first, depending on how you look at it) had to head back to Atlanta to work)