April Prayer Partner: Praying for Kids at the Border
April 6, 2021
My family and I visited a friend’s church to celebrate the resurrection on Sunday. The gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection aren’t new to me, of course, but the sermon highlighted an element of the story that struck me in a new way: the women who became the first witnesses of the resurrection went to the tomb on that Sunday morning worrying about a logistical problem: how would they move the stone in order to anoint Jesus’ corpse with spices?
They arrived to find that Jesus hadn’t just rolled the stone away: He had rolled death away! Facing legitimately overwhelming circumstances, our human imaginations are often too limited to conceive of how God will rescue us.
The overwhelming logistical challenge heavy on my heart and mind the past few weeks has been the situation along the U.S. border, particularly for unaccompanied children. The number of children and teenagers arriving at our country’s border without a parent or legal guardian has dramatically surpassed the capacity of our government’s infrastructure to provide appropriate care in compliance with U.S. laws, and thousands of kids are presently stuck in unacceptable conditions.
Last month, the leaders of the Evangelical Immigration Table urged President Biden to decisively and compassionately resolve this situation, offering specific policy recommendations and echoing their responses to similar humanitarian crises in 2014 and 2019. But while we insist that governmental leaders do their part and, as Christians and local churches, we find tangible ways to respond to vulnerable kids and families (see some suggestions here), we also should be looking to God. In prayer, we can ask Him to resolve the situation in ways beyond what our limited human minds can ask or imagine, availing ourselves of the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead (Eph 3:20).
As often as you see reports of this upsetting situation for children in media or God just brings it to your mind, I’d encourage you to pray, asking God to be near to those children and to give wisdom to those entrusted with directly responding to the situation, from Border Patrol agents and staff for the Department of Health and Human Services and its partner organizations to the president and his cabinet.
If you’d like a place to pray with others for this situation, you’re welcome to join us next Monday, April 12 at 4 PM Eastern Time/3 PM Central Time/2 PM Mountain Time/1 PM Pacific Time. You can send us an email at info@evangelicalimmigrationtable.com to receive the Zoom link. We’ll simply break into small groups and have a short informal time of prayer for children, their families, the countries they’ve come from, those entrusted with their care and those setting policies that impact them.
With hope in the Resurrected Christ,
Matthew Soerens
National Coordinator, Evangelical Immigration Table
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The Evangelical Immigration Table is a broad coalition of evangelical organizations and leaders advocating for immigration reform consistent with biblical values.
