🩹Heal: Let it breathe.

For skinned knees and broken hearts

I spent my childhood summers reading or being outside (preferably at the same time). I rocked skinned knees and ankles with bug bites, pleading with my mom to buy the character bandages for my summertime injuries.

I was the type of kid who wanted first-aid action for anything and everything.

“You gotta let it breathe,” my mom sometimes would tell me when I demanded another bandage for my scraped elbow.

Even the worst wounds need oxygen to heal properly.

We have so many collective and individual hurts that we’re holding. How are we supposed to raise our kids in a world that chooses harm over healing, time after time?

Heal is a Band-Aid word that can be used to paper over our humanity. Are you hurting? God is healer! End of story!

But the more complicated truth is that even under the glorious, infinite love of our wounded healer, many of us spend lifetimes praying and waiting for the healing to come, hoping and yet knowing healing might not come to us this side of heaven.

I don’t have the answers.

But I do know that sometimes, the best we can do with our weeping wounds is to let them breathe.

I created Year of Breath because we need a minute (or several) to catch our breaths.

From To Light Their Way: In our overwhelming daily realities, it’s easy to become disconnected from who God has created us to be—fully human, with a connected heart, soul, mind, and body (see Luke 10:27).

If parenting is a continual undoing, these breath prayers act as a tangible invitation to let God piece us back together, breath by breath.

This world is not as it should be. In all your wounds and worries, maybe breath is an entry point for us to, as my friend Aundi Kolber says, heal anyway.

Pray This With Your Kids

Daily prayer isn’t magic. It’s not a supernatural bandage for fixing wounds or ensuring that life will work out the way you hoped (or planned). But praying together can remind your family that all you do and all you are comes from God. And in the moments when we can barely find our footing, those glimmers of grace we sometimes glimpse when we pray can be downright sustaining.

In my new book Every Season Sacred: Reflections, Prayers, and Invitations to Nourish Your Soul and Nurture Your Family throughout the Year, there’s a section in the back with daily prayers to share with your kids.

This is taken from “A Prayer for Morning.”

Thank You for the gift

Of another morning

On Your big, beautiful earth.

Where there is pain,

May we bring healing.

Where there is suffering,

May we bring hope.

Be with each of us

As we go about the day.

And when the day is done,

Bring us home safely

Under the shelter of Your wings.

Amen.

Guest Liturgy

Our guest liturgist this week is

Jenai Auman

, a Filipina American writer, artist, and author of the brand-new book Othered: Finding Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized. She draws from her years in church leadership and trauma-informed training to write on healing, hope, and the way forward.

She is passionate about providing language so readers can find a faith that frees.

She received her bachelor's degree in behavioral health science and is pursuing a master's in spiritual formation at Northeastern Seminary. Jenai lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Tyler, and their sons, Quinn and Graham.

Thank you for sharing your prayer for healing from hurt and harm, Jenai.

O God the Life-giver,

Who shapes us 

With the gentle pressure 

Of majestic hands,

Who bends an ear to us—

Those who have been unmade.

We are the outcasts, estranged, and othered.

God of compassion,

Hold our tears.

Heal our hurt.

Help us have hope.

We sought refuge among your people.

Weary and wandering,

We crossed the threshold of Your shelter

To find a balm for our pain.

We hoped for life among your living stones.

We retreated to the sanctuary of your presence—

To experience peace in You.

But with Your people,

We have weathered wounds.

Your holy words have been used

To fracture what your Spirit

Is now mending within us.

O God, please hear us,

For Your living stones have stoned us.

Meet us where we are.

Breathe new life inside of us.

Grant us a voice

That we might tell our stories.

In all the ways we have been unmade,
Help make us new.

Help us calm the chaos,

So that we may have eyes to see.

Keep us tender and spacious.

Grant us wisdom—

That we may never become

The hammer that hurt us.

Breath Prayer

As you breathe, remember that you are not alone.