The Prayer I Prayed for My Son

Somewhere around the time my son learned to argue back, I noticed I’d been praying for the wrong thing.

I had started out, like most fathers do, praying that he’d turn out a certain way. Smart. Steady. Maybe a little more disciplined than I was at his age, since I had a head start on knowing where that road dead-ends. It’s a natural prayer. It’s also, I eventually figured out, a prayer mostly about me.

Proverbs puts it differently than I did:

“Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.” — Proverbs 22:6 (NIV)

The way they should go — not the way I should’ve gone, not the way I wished I’d gone, not the way that would make me look good at his graduation. His way. The verse doesn’t say start him off as a smaller version of you. It assumes, right there in the wording, that the path belongs to him before you ever showed up.

So somewhere in there my prayer changed. I stopped asking for a particular outcome and started asking for the wisdom to recognize his path when it didn’t look like mine — and, just as often, for the good sense to keep my mouth shut while he found it.

I will tell you that second part was the harder prayer to get answered.

Raising him has been the best joke I never saw coming — the kind where you’re laughing so hard at how wrong your predictions were that you forget to be embarrassed about it.

He did not become the things I guessed he’d become. He became better things, mostly, and a few stranger things, and at least one thing I still don’t fully understand but have learned to enjoy from a respectful distance. That’s the part nobody warns you about: the job isn’t building a person to your specifications. It’s standing close enough to catch him if he needs it, and far enough away that he doesn’t notice you’re still standing there.

I’ve prayed for guidance more times than I can count — usually right before a conversation I was dreading, occasionally right after one I’d already botched. I don’t think I always got the wisdom on schedule. I think I mostly got the humility to apologize, try again, and laugh about it later, which might be wisdom’s slower, funnier cousin.

What I can tell you, now that I’m on the other side of most of it: it has been a joy. Not a tidy joy, not an easy one — a loud, surprising, occasionally exasperating joy, the kind that sneaks up on you at odd moments, like watching him solve a problem his own way, a way you never would have thought of, and realizing the prayer worked better than you knew to ask for.

If you’re still in the middle of it — still praying that prayer, still biting your tongue, still wondering if you’re doing it right — I can’t promise you’ll get it right on the first try. I didn’t. But the way he should go was never going to be identical to the way you’d have picked for him anyway. Pray for the wisdom to tell the difference. The joy, it turns out, takes care of itself.