Honest Prayers for Mama Bears
Honest Prayers for Mama Bears
By: Hillary Morgan Ferrer and Julie Loos
“Be steadfast. Even when there appears to be no answers to prayer— persevere. Even if you must pray out of a sense of duty, do it! Soon it will turn to delight as you concentrate on the character of God more than the charity of God.”
I think this book is definitely worth owning, even if you’re not a mom, but especially if you are. It enriches your prayer life and gives words to all the things you want to pray but never knew how to. It also brings up things you didn’t realize you needed to pray for but are glad you can now.
I’ve been using this book for a couple months now. I would take one or two prayers a day, read through them, and then personalize the concept to my own life. Normally I’m a very distracted pray-er and not a very consistent one. I would lose focus or just not know what to pray about. My mind was either blank or too overwhelmingly full to know where to start. This book has really changed the way I’ve prayed. I’ve prayed for longer periods than I ever have before.
There are so many ways you can use this book. You can go through the book cover to cover and let it give you an area to focus. You can search for the type of prayer that resonates with you on a particular day. You can send these prayers to others you know are struggling. You can pray them on your own for other people. You can use them as launching points to talk to your kids about certain topics or teach them how they can pray about things they’re struggling with. You can also gift this to another expecting mom at a baby shower!
The prayers are divided up into 12 sections ranging from prayers about the self, your home, rhythms of life, things our kids will have to deal with, things you pray you never have to pray, things for church and school, and more.
Within each section they have prayers titled well to help you find what you need like:
When God Feels Silent
Pregnancy Loss
When My Child is Bullied
While Doing Laundry
Before a Family Trip
Cultivating Sexual Faithfulness
Stewarding My Body Well
That’s just a sampling of the 147 prayers in this book. You can also access the index in the back that categorizes the prayers by topic like ‘anxiety’, ‘comfort’, ‘culture’, ‘fear’, etc.
I appreciated the afterword and appendix that talk a little more about what prayer is for and what could hinder our prayers. The idea of creating a legacy of prayer really resonates with me even though I think I’m doing a terrible job of it right now.
Because I don’t like to pray out loud I know I’ve already missed a lot of great opportunities to pray more with my kids than I have. I worry they won’t even really know how to pray and I don’t want them to turn into me! So a lot of my prayers will be centered around asking for help and courage and motivation to be more intentional and purposeful with my prayers around my kids and trying to disciple them in prayer.
I have many memories of my own mom praying daily. I’m not sure my kids have those same perceptions about what I do with my time, at least yet. But I want them to know that prayer is important and commanded and I want them to know they grew up in a home covered in prayer.
Let me be clear: this book did not guilt me, it has encouraged me and reminded me how easy it can be to ‘pray without ceasing.’
Recommendation
I just really love the whole Mama Bear inventory. I’ve read their other books (THIS ONE and THIS ONE) and highly recommend them. They provide so many tools for parents to disciple their children and to answer hard questions and broach tough subjects as we point them to Christ. I cannot recommend their stuff enough.
Buy them because it’s not something you just read once and move on. It’s a reference and a resource and every parent should have them. This prayer book included. Although, one of their goals is that in using their book to help you pray that eventually you won’t need it anymore because you will have trained yourself in how to do it. At that point, then you can gift your copy to someone else.
So yes, I recommend this book one hundred percent. It’s enhanced and grown my ability to pray so much.
**Received a copy via Harvest House Publishing in exchange for an honest review**
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