SPEND MORE TIME TALKING TO GOD ABOUT YOUR ADULT-CHILD THAN TALKING TO YOUR ADULT-CHILD ABOUT GOD

If you become the parent of a child who, as he or she is growing into young adulthood chooses to leave the faith, you will no doubt be doing a lot of soul searching, filing through your database of memories to look for a moment during your kid’s childhood when you might have said the wrong thing or didn’t work hard enough to do the right thing. It can be really vexing if you went to weekly Mass as a family, enrolled your children in Catholic school and maybe even a Catholic college, and perhaps saw them spend years as altar servers or involved in parish youth ministry, yet still, one or more of your kids as they aged walked away from the Church. You may frustratingly think you failed as a Catholic/Christian.

Let me start with the bad news: There is no promise that if you do everything “right” when your kids are young, that as they grow up they will be faithful Catholics. Statistically speaking, the chances are extremely high that your children will leave the Catholic faith as they mature into young adults. If you have young kids, while they are under your roof they will be as active in their faith as you expect them to be, but when they reach adulthood and move out of the house, it’s anyone’s guess as to if they will continue in Christian practices or not.             

Now for the good news: There is one thing you can do as parents of teenagers and young adults that will increase the odds they will be practicing Catholics as they mature.

So, what is that one thing mom and dad to do when son or daughter grows up and grows away from God? Pray!

Praying directly to our Lord is your primary act, but I also suggest you ask for Saint Monica’s intercession and ask her to also pray for your wayward child. An intercessory pray is when one prays to God on behalf of another. If your child was seriously ill you would pray to God, but you would also ask your friends and family to please pray for your youngster as well. In the case of your child falling away from the faith, pray to God but also ask Saint Monica to pray for your kid as well.

So, of the thousands of Saints, why is Monica the one to whom you should ask for intercessory prayers? Monica herself prayed to God on behalf of her wayward son and pagan husband. She is the perfect Saint in heaven to ask for her intercessory prayers. 

Monica lived in the fourth-century, and her parents gave her away to a man named Patritius, as was the custom with her people at that time with arranging marriages. Unfortunately, her parents chose badly, as Monica was a Catholic but her chosen husband was a non-believing pagan. He ended up also being a nasty husband, yet Monica endured this with patience. Her persistent example of prayer and faith eventually led to her husband deciding to be baptized a Catholic only a year before his death.

They had three children whom Monica raised Catholic, but one of them, a son named Augustine, broke away from the faith in his teen years and began living a vain and dissolute life, especially with sexual immorality. Monica endured much suffering for the next couple of decades as she constantly prayed for her son and urged him to return to the Church and end his immoral ways, but Augustine consistently rejected her. At one point, she consulted a bishop about how her son wouldn’t listen to her, and the bishop told her that it was better to talk to God about Augustine than to talk to Augustine about God. The bishop also told her, “At present the heart of the young man is too stubborn, but God’s time will come. It is not possible that the son of so many tears should perish.”

A discouraged Monica cried a lot but never gave up. She continued praying for her rebellious son, and her prayers were answered when Augustine ended his sinful ways and returned to the Church. Monica died soon thereafter, and Augustine ended up not only being a faithful Catholic, but eventually becoming a famous Bishop and after death canonized a saint. Saint Augustine is considered one of the top scholars in Church history, one of the few named a Doctor of the Church.

Since Monica herself became a Saint – the patron of wives, mothers, conversions, alcoholics, and abuse victims – she is a wonderful example of hope, patience, perseverance, and persistence in prayer. Thus, she is the most common Saint parents and spouses pray to for her intercession when they have a family member who has turned away from God. She believed that God would never abandon her family, even when it seemed as if He was not present and even in the hardest of times.

Along with first praying directly to our Almighty Father, here is one intercessory prayer parents can make if their children have left the Church:

“Saint Monica, I need your prayers. You know exactly how I’m feeling because you once felt it yourself. I’m hurting, hopeless, and in despair. I desperately want my child to return to Christ in His Church, but I can’t do it alone. I need God’s help. Please join me in begging the Lord’s powerful grace to flow into my child’s life. Ask the Lord Jesus to soften his/her heart, prepare a path for his/her conversion, and activate the Holy Spirit in his/her life. Amen.”

It was both due to her persistent modeling of a faithful Catholic and her unceasing prayers that Monica’s prayers for her husband and son were answered. Jesus told us of the importance of unceasing prayers when he told the parable of the widow and the unjust judge to his followers:

“Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, ‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.  In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’  For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’ And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says.  And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them?  I tell you; he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’”  (Luke 18:1-8).

Jesus knew that we are weak, we are prone to lose heart, and we might quit praying, which is why He told this parable. A main reason we lose heart in prayer is because we don’t get an immediate answer to our prayer and have no patience for the delay in God’s answer. This is the source of discouragement that Jesus is addressing in the Luke account. Jesus knew that from our imperfect human perspective, we often feel that God is not answering us, let alone listening, because we cannot see things from His divine perspective. 

We would be greatly mistaken if we thought that Jesus was teaching that God is like this self-centered, callous judge. That would run counter to the entire biblical revelation of the character of God as a loving and tender Father in relation to His children. Jesus uses this humorous example as an argument from the lesser to the greater, taken to absurd lengths. If this widow could get justice from this hardened, crusty, uncaring old judge, doesn’t it follow that the loving, tender, gracious heavenly Father will hear and answer His own children when they cry out to Him for relief? 

One of the most difficult aspects of prayer is persevering when it seems that God is not answering. All of us have requests that we have brought before God for years, and yet it seems like God has ghosted us and isn’t responding. In light of these problems, it is easy to lose hope and even to give up praying.

The Lord Jesus knew the weakness of our flesh and that we all are prone to lose heart. In light of that, He graciously gave His disciples and us this parable in Luke 18 to show that at all times we ought to pray and not lose heart. God has promised that His Messiah, the Son of Man, will return one day in power and glory. He will judge the earth and vindicate His people. But in the interim, as we wait for His promises to be fulfilled, if we want not to lose heart, we must pray always.

Prayer is not an optional activity for the more committed. It is a necessity for every believer because it acknowledges our total dependence on God. Not to pray is arrogance, because I am really saying, “Thanks, God, but I can handle this by myself.” But the truth is, I cannot handle anything by myself apart from God’s grace and power! And so, at all times we ought to pray. 

When I was a Catholic school principal, one of my kindergarten teachers once told me a cute story about when one school morning she asked her class to all pray to God that one of the parents in the class would get better from an illness. The class prayed out loud together using a teacher directed, typical format of, “Dear God, please help Tommy’s mom get better…” As soon as they finished praying, one of the kindergarteners blurted out to the teacher, “What did God say?” The teacher explained that it doesn’t work that way; sometimes it takes a long time to get an answer from God. The student made a scowl and annoyingly uttered, “Do you mean we were praying to His voicemail!?”

Sometimes it seems like it, doesn’t it? God won’t explain at the time why He is delaying the answers to our requests. But we need to cling to the fact that His delays are always for our good, even if we don’t understand the reasons why. We must understand it from God’s timetable, not ours. With the Lord, a thousand years are like a day:

• God told Noah that there would be a flood, but 100 years went by without a drop of rain while Noah endured his mocking neighbors who watched him built an ark on his property.

• God promised Abraham a son, but he watched Sarah go through menopause, and Isaac wasn’t born until 25 years elapsed.

• God promised Joseph in his teenage years through his dreams that his father and brothers would bow down to him, but Joseph spent his twenties in an Egyptian dungeon before these dreams came true.

• God promised to deliver His people from bondage in Egypt, but 400 long years went by before He raised up Moses, and that only after Moses spent 40 years in the desert after his failure.

• God promised to send His Messiah, but His people had to wait 400 years after the last prophet before God sent His Son.

You get the point? Quickly by God’s calendar is not quickly by ours. So, keep on praying and don’t lose heart. He will bring about justice for you speedily, according to His timetable, not yours!

When our children are young, we teach them about God, share Bible passages, and instill in them that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. But when our children grow up into young adults, our “catechist license” will have expired. It will then be our Lord who will take over and win our older children’s hearts and souls. Our job is to ride out the storm that may take many years from our kids’ late teens to their late 20s (or 30s or…), all the while modeling His love, praying constantly, and trusting in His divine providence.