Guide My Feet: Prayers and Meditations for Our Children

by Marian Wright Edelman

Overview

"Edelman blends gospel passages with her own personal prayers, and her reverence for the young brings a depth to this book that goes well beyond the words." —Los Angeles Times

"A wonderfully warm, poignant, and truly touching and attractive anthology." —Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu

Here are prayers and meditations for parents and others who strive to instill values of faith, integrity, compassion, and service in our children at a time when these ideals are threatened by commercialism and violence. With warmth and conviction, Marian Wright Edelman shares her own prayers as well as inspirational readings from others. Turn to this book for guidelines and support—again and again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060958190
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/19/2000
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

Marian Wright Edelman is the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours and eight other books. She is the winner of many awards for her work, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, a Heinz Award, and a Niebuhr Award. In 2000, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings. Edelman is a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School. She and her husband live in Washington, DC, and have three children and four grandchildren.

Read an Excerpt

Prayers for the Gift and Raising of Children

Dear God, I thank You for the gift of this child to raise, this life to share, this mind to help mold, this body to nurture, and this spirit to enrich. Let me never betray this child's trust, dampen this child's hope, or discourage this child's dreams. Help me dear God to help this precious child become all You mean him to be. Let Your grace and love fall on him like gentle breezes and give him inner strength and peace and patience for the journey ahead.

God, like Hannah's son Samuel, let my children grow up in Your presence and seek out Your ways, and attend to Your work. Thank you God for my children.

Oh God, help us to be worthy of the children You have entrusted to our care.

Editorial Reviews

"Marian Edelman blends gospel passages with her own personal prayers and her reverence for the young brings a depth to this book that goes well beyond the words." — Los Angeles Times

"A wonderfully warm, poignant, and truly touching and attractive anthology. . . . How I hope it succeeds in helping to make our communities more child-friendly." — Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu

From the Publisher

"A wonderfully warm, poignant, and truly touching and attractive anthology. . . . How I hope it succeeds in helping to make our communities more child-friendly."

Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu

"Marian Edelman blends gospel passages with her own personal prayers and her reverence for the young brings a depth to this book that goes well beyond the words."

|Los Angeles Times

"Marian Edelman blends gospel passages with her own personal prayers and her reverence for the young brings a depth to this book that goes well beyond the words."

Los Angeles Times

Guide my feet while I run this race. Guide my feet while I run this race. Guide my feet while I run this race, for I don't want to run this race in vain. — Negro spiritual

With Guide My Feet, Marian Wright Edelman hoped to enrich the lives of children by educating the adults around them. "I set out to write a different book — a policy book — but out tumbled prayers instead." And who could blame her? Edelman has made it her life's work to advocate the enrichment of the lives of America's children, to ensure America's future. A longtime civil rights lawyer and founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, she has taken as her mission the education of all Americans about the needs of children.

She states at the outset: "As I have grown older and wearier trying to help get our nation to put our children first and become more worried about my own children growing up in an America where morals and common sense and family and community val- ues are disintegrating, I pray more and more." This small treasure of a book is intended as a spiritual reference of prayers, meditations, and personal faith in hopes that the rituals that precede and bolster these daily affirmations of people, family, and self will give black Americans and all Americans the strength to take active roles in their children's lives and, subsequently, in their own.

Sacred Fire