A Prayer for our Children - Knowing They are Loved

I'm going to be writing a prayer for our children, which I hope may be useful to other people too, each day in Holy Week. I'll accompany the prayer with a photo of our Easter Garden, as it changes through the week. The donkey is here because it was Palm Sunday yesterday - Carolyn has a great post about Palm Sunday here if you want to think about that a bit more than a plastic donkey will allow! If you want to read the Palm Sunday story with your children, I wrote it here last year. Dear Lord, you gave us our children, and in fact they belong more to you and to themselves than they ever will to us. j We love them but at the same time we know that we haven't always loved them perfectly. Please forgive us for the times we've let them down, harmed them, over-indulged them or otherwise made it hard for them to trust our love. Knowing that you love them perfectly, let our love for them be a mirror for yours, teaching them what it is to love and be loved unconditionally. And in grace and forgiveness, let us continue to grow together as a family where each one loves and know he is loved. jAmen