Prayers for my mother.
She has been religion-hopping all of her life, though she was consistently Baptist for fifteen years, while we kids were growing up. She typically spends an average of three years becoming a fervent believer in something, before dropping it and moving on to something else. But it was almost always some form of Nicean Christianity (with the exception of a couple of years doing “past lives” and several years as a Mormon), so it has been generally no big deal, until recently.
After moving to her present city, she found that she was only a block away from a Greek Orthodox Church. She spent maybe less than two years shuttling between that and an Antiochian church not far away. But she found the worldliness, the focus on Greek ethnicity, etc, and together with prejudices from her Protestant days, like an ongoing belief in “believer baptism” (ie, small children should not be baptized), she has left that, too. Her chiropractor turned out to be Muslim, and now she is following Islam with the same eagerness with which she pursued everything else. That has been very heavy and hard for me, as I have relied on her all my life, as a confidante, as moral support - and now I don’t feel I can do that. I was really shocked when I found that she had taken my daughter to a mosque while the latter was visiting last summer, and it was only by the grace of God that the event of the moment was teaching about animal sacrifice in Islam, something totally repulsive to my semi-vegan daughter. But it still broke trust.
There certainly is hope that she will come to abandon this as a fad, too, but it is doing tremendous damage to our personal relationship. I mustn’t alienate her, but I cannot be silent, smile and nod my head, either.
My own prayers seem so weak and worthless and insufficient. I feel I need intercession from both the temporarily living and the truly Living.