A mother's prayers for her teenager

If I ever had a time in my life when I needed to pray, it was when I became aware that our daughter was experimenting with drugs. During her teen years, she began hanging out with a different group of kids than she was friends with when we first moved to our town the year before. She wanted to spend lots of time away from home and was often rebellious and dishonest. It was a scary situation that took my husband—who is her stepdad—and me often to our knees in prayer for her safety and well-being. 

During this two-year period, we prayed consistently, often with the help of a Christian Science practitioner. Our daughter was unwilling to join us in this approach to find healing. We tried counseling, random drug tests, and staying in “high alert” mode, yet she was determined to continue using drugs and told us so many times. But we continued praying, communicating, and expressing our love for her.

During a particularly dark period of time when curfews were being ignored and I felt our trust had been exhausted, I was tempted to feel that this was a hopeless situation and prayer was getting us nowhere. Yet, I still wanted to call a practitioner. And I did. This time, the talk with the practitioner shook me up. 

I overwhelmingly felt that I was doing all I knew how to do, yet, the practitioner helped me see what was truly needed. Mere faith in God, coupled with human efforts were not going to get the job done. Rather, I recognized that I needed to pray with deeper consecration and clarity that would help me better understand more of God’s nature and our daughter’s unbroken relationship with God.

I’d always valued the first chapter of Genesis. It sets the bar for effective prayer. The genuine nature of God and the spiritual foundation of all life are defined in this chapter. As I prayed with statements such as, “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (1:31 ), I yearned to see this about our daughter—to better understand the infinite goodness, love, perfection, and all-power of God and to see that these were not just abstract statements, beyond our grasp, or useless in this situation. Nothing could block our recognition that God’s laws are completely good, and that these laws have all the true power there really is. They were actively showing us our daughter’s genuine, God-created identity. I could prayerfully affirm these God-given facts about her and refute anything that wasn’t aligned with that standard of goodness. I did this with all my heart. I felt my conviction growing and my understanding of God deepening. 

Gradually, I felt assured I couldn’t fail as a mom. Rather, I could count on God, who was our daughter’s Father-Mother, the only creator, and the only genuine power of the universe, to lovingly help us recognize solutions. I was God’s child, too! I could express the parenthood of God, but it wasn’t up to me to define it. God had already done that. Holding fast to this truth brought relief from fear and a burdened sense of responsibility. 

Gradually, I felt assured I couldn't fail as a mom.

Then there was the overwhelming concern I had that drug abuse was rampant with many teens and had poisoned their way of thinking responsibly. Bottom line: I felt that my daughter’s friends had been a bad influence. It wasn’t at all easy, but, in my prayers, I had to reverse the false conclusions that there could be another influence besides God. A concept I’ve found really helpful comes from Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “Spiritual sense is a conscious, constant capacity to understand God” (p. 209 ). I realized I needed spiritual sense to look beyond what I was seeing about these kids and my daughter, in order to see them as God was seeing them. One morning, I realized with such a loving and comforting feeling that all those kids were God’s children, not victims of drugs or bad decisions, but instead innocent and pure. I felt so grateful.

The Bible’s First Commandment also came to my thought. I recognized the promise that there is only one God. From this standpoint, I could affirm that my daughter’s peers were not “other gods” who had power to negatively impact her in any way. It was crucial for me to see that God’s law of pure goodness governed each and every one in His creation and that bad influences didn’t come from God. To me, that meant that anything that wasn’t completely good had no place in their lives. Praying in this manner was so helpful. 

Soon, our daughter invited me to join a gym with her so we could work out together—the first time she’d invited me to do something with her in a while. I totally supported that wonderful opportunity to spend quality time with her. My career naturally changed into a part-time position at the Christian Science Committee on Publication office in our state. This gave me more opportunities to pray and to spend time with my daughter. I found that I was also increasingly reading The Christian Science Monitor, an international newspaper established by Mary Baker Eddy, whose purpose is to “injure no man, but to bless all mankind” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 353 ). As I focused my prayers on issues in the world, I was amazed at how beautifully I could share what I was learning from this work with my daughter. I felt assured that she was included in this global healing work, too. 

By the end of her senior year in high school, we had seen a natural dissolving of the issue with drugs. We felt comfortable that she was leaving home to begin her college education. She had a great time in college and met the terrific young man who is now her husband. Both she and her husband express so many spiritual qualities, like joy, compassion, gentleness, honesty, intelligence, integrity—I could go on and on! 

I could never express enough gratitude for Christian Science for providing the tools I needed to pray through this experience. Regardless of the severity of challenges that come our way, I’m convinced our loving Father-Mother God is right here with each one of us, and as we listen, we can realize that God is making Himself known in ways that truly bless.