Hunger Games... Praying About Our Children

Today's New York Times review of the blockbuster movie, "The Hunger Games," being released Friday, ends with this description of the main character, Katniss: "an American Eve, battered, bruised and deeply knowing, scrambles through a garden not of her making on her way to a new world."

As a lifelong educator, I was deeply moved by that description of a teenage girl. It rings true. The setting for "The Hunger Games" is a post-apocalyptic North America, but the review's language also describes, perhaps purposefully, the environment many of our teens are growing up in today.

Not having seen the movie, I'll withhold judgment on the wisdom of a movie about children hunting and killing other children. Whether this movie promotes or somehow helps to diminish that horror, which we've already seen play out in our own schools, remains to be seen.

For those Americans who believe in the power of prayer, which, it turns out, is most of us (well over 70 percent according to a recent Fox News poll), it seems like we should be praying pretty earnestly about our children's safety and well being.

How do we do that? I believe there are many ways to pray and no one right way. The prayer of affirmation, a prayer affirming what we already know to be true about God and man, often seems to me like an effective way to pray.

A retired Army Ranger, who also happened to be a Christian Science chaplain, once asked me over lunch if I knew God's phone number. After chuckling at my puzzlement, he gave it to me. Isaiah 65:24. I had to admit I didn't know that particular Biblical passage, and thus gave him the opening he was waiting for:

"And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear."

Is this a good prayer for our children? For me it is. As a father myself, I find it comforting because it affirms the fact of an ever-present power in our children's lives that they can turn to a divine father/mother presence that already knows their needs and always helps them find within themselves the ability and power to overcome evil and promote good.

That's a powerful prayer... and it's probably a good time to pray it.