by Mike Peercy, Executive Director of Fostering Grace

This is simply a start, but here are some important ways we can pray for kids from hard places.

1 – That they will feel safe.

One of the most crucial things for us to understand about kids in foster care is that all of them have some pretty serious trauma in their life experience (even if it is only being removed from their home or birth family). Trauma messes up the circuits in the brain and can cause serious perception problems. It is not enough that these kids are safe—which is the basic threshold of expectation for a foster home, of course. It is really important that they feel safe.

2 – That they will be seen.

When a person is pulled out of the life they have known and placed into a new situation, there are so very many kinds of feelings that will experience. There is a tendency to either act out or to try to hide or fade into the background. One of the most crucial pieces of their healing is that people around them (foster parents, teachers, caseworkers, etc.) will truly see them with compassionate eyes and great dignity.

3 – That they will connect.

While trauma is a nearly universal reality for a kid in foster care, the most powerful means of healing from trauma is to form deep and genuine connection with others—most particularly parenting figures. We want to see them flourish, but that is unlikely without a strong sense of connection.

4 – That they will have hope.

This is a hard one because we have a strong tendency to want to overly define what hope should look like in a situation. What we can always be sure of is that the power of hope is very significant. Pray that these kids will see many reasons to hope for a better future than their painful past would lead them to expect.

5 – That they will experience grace.

When a kid lands in a foster home, the ideal would be that they would immediately get a sense that they were deeply cared for without any correlation to their behavior. When a stranger steps into the mess of our lives to love us when they don’t have to do so, it speaks far more loudly than any words could ever be heard. That love in action is the true expression of grace—doing what is best for someone because we love them with no regard for whether they deserve it.

If you don’t know of a particular kid in foster care that you can pray for today, pray anyway and trust that God will know which of these precious souls need it uniquely today.