Prayers during a Pandemic: For Children in Foster Care

Our family is taking time daily to pray about the current global health crisis. Our prayers will likely reference the Christian tradition, but we’ve written with an ecumenical and agnostic audience in mind.

If you’d like us to pray for you, let us know. If you’d like us to write a prayer for you or for a concern you have and share it here, just ask. You don’t have to share your name if you don’t want to, and we won’t share it or any other identifying details about you here or elsewhere.

Today we pray for children in foster care as well as those who recently left the foster care system, especially college students who may be struggling to find a place to “come home” to.

Today we pray for children in the foster care system and those who have recently graduated from it. We pray, too, for foster parents, respite foster parents, and social workers serving in foster care. We pray for all those who love and support children and foster families.

We pray for those we don’t know and for those we do, including [names of people involved in foster care, including ourselves].

We pray for children who may fear entering the foster care system but who are not safe in their biological parents’ homes. We pray for them confidence that they will be cared for. We pray for them soothing of conflicted feelings about pursuing their own safety. We pray for them assurance that they are loved and remembered. Our hope for them is safety, security, affection, support, and the meeting of all their physical, social, and emotional needs.

We pray for foster families, that they retain optimism, hope, acceptance, and compassion, that the welcome they share never wanes but that they are sustained by broader communities of support and kindness. We pray for just treatment of children in foster care, positive relationships between them and other children and adults in their foster homes, and ethical treatment throughout their engagement in the foster care system.

We are thankful for children in our community and grateful for the opportunity to meet all their needs. We are thankful for foster families and those who protect children.

Above, The Siblings by Max Lieberman shows a young child and a baby playing together on the floor. The older child holds a doll, which the younger one examines. Every child deserves a safe, loving family.