We hold many precious souls in our prayerful hearts on this Mother’s Day weekend.

Hear us, O God, as we open our hearts to you. 

We pray for women who are mothers—women who have dared to say “yes” to the daunting challenges of bearing or adopting or fostering children and raising them into a meaningful adulthood.

Bring grace and strength to mothers this weekend, that they might continue to love with integrity and find both joy and meaning in their motherhood.

We pray for women who gave birth to children and who then bravely released those children into the processes of adoption or foster caregiving so that new families might be created.

Draw near to these women and these new families as they experience the grief of letting go and the hope of new possibilities.

We pray for troubled relationships—for mothers who are alienated from their children and children who are alienated from their mothers.

Bring your healing peace to the hearts of those who find themselves weeping on opposite sides of a chasm of estrangement.

We pray for children grieving over the death of their mothers and mothers grieving over the death of their children.

Comfort them with the blessed assurance that, in Jesus, death is never given the final word to speak.

We pray for women who carry in their souls the deep and complicated grief of a miscarriage or multiple miscarriages.

Allow your divine tears to commingle with theirs, and hold them in the tender embrace of your healing love.

We pray for children who are abused or mistreated by their mothers and for mothers who are abused or mistreated by their children.

Intervene and help others to intervene, so that safety, repentance, forgiveness, and healing will find fresh expression in the midst of broken covenants.

We pray for women who live in the complex and often difficult aftermath of abortion.

Make your presence known to them in ways that are life-giving and restorative.

We pray for mothers who care for their children in the face of domestic abuse and the perpetual threat of violence.

Into these troubled homes bring your spirit of deliverance and transformation.

We pray for women who yearn to be mothers but who live with the anguish of an unfulfilled maternal longing.

Bring wholeness to their broken hearts and comfort to their saddened souls.

We pray with thanksgiving for all the women who have been a mothering presence in our lives, mentoring us, teaching us, forming us, disciplining us, and revealing to us the Divine Heart in their loving embrace.

We are grateful for the women who have mothered us; who have taught us what it means to love you with heart, soul, and mind; and who have shown us what it looks like to be authentically human.

Where people find delight in Mother’s Day this year, expand and deepen their spirit of joy. Where people find pain and anxiety, envelop their hurt in your healing grace. Help us to be attentive to both the pleasure and the sadness that Mother’s Day can inspire in the hearts of your people.

Through both the joy and the pain, enable us to experience afresh the goodness of your perfect and unfailing parental love. Usher us all more deeply into Jesus, whose grace covers all situations of motherhood and in whose name we gratefully pray. Amen.