Three Ways Coaches Can Pray Scripture For Their Families
“Just so you know, my goal over the next couple of seasons is to convince you not to become a college coach.”
I was in the first month of being a volunteer assistant cross-country coach at a Division 1 school. The hope was that after a couple of seasons under this coach’s leadership, he would begin floating my name to athletic directors around the countrywho were looking for a new distance coach. He made his comment in jest, but there was truth to it as well. Before I took the position, he told me it was nearly impossible to give your best as a coach and your family as well. This Christian man offered his own life as living proof of how challenging it was to balance the demands of the vocation with the desire to be around his loved ones.
This coach eventually succeeded. Though it was more about me feeling a call to ministry than feeling pulled away from coaching because of schedule demands, I saw the strain it put on his family.
He is not alone. In a study of college coaches from 2019, around 80% of coaches agreed that the strong demands of their profession would mean saying yes to a last-second meeting, even if it meant they would have to stay late at the office.
What follows will not solve the daily pressure and demands that coaches face. It certainly won’t solve choosing between “another meeting” and making it home to enjoy dinner with your spouse (and kids). But it will, hopefully, give you a few action steps to “choose” your family while you are still on the field or in the office.
Coach, praying for your family daily is a great way to prioritize them, even when you are not home. Here are three ways you can use the Bible to pray for your spouse and your kids. If you don’t have either yet, you can leverage what follows to pray for your parents and/or siblings—or even pray for the family members of the other coaches on your staff.
Pray the verse exactly as it reads
In an article for The Gospel Coalition, Andrew David Naselli outlined 12 reasons Christians should pray scripture. You can read the entire thing for yourself, but two stood out as especially relevant.
Praying scripture helps you pray confidently. It releases you from wondering what to pray or even if you are praying the right things. Because scripture is entirely true, we can use it confidently as a playbook for prayer.
Praying scripture keeps our prayer life fresh. It’s easy to pray for the same things over and over again. After all, we are habitual beings who default to routines and say the same things. Don’t believe me? Ask your team to recite your most commonly used phrases and watch how quickly they jump at the opportunity! The Bible gives us a new language and new categories to think through instead of the usual “Be with them. Bless them. Protect them.” As Don Whitney once observed, “The problem is not our praying about the same old things, for Jesus taught us (in Luke 11:5–13; 18:1–8) to pray with persistence for good things. Our problem is in always praying about them with the same ritualistic, heartless expressions.”
Here’s some good news: Many parts of the Bible are prayers. For instance, take what Paul says in Romans 15:13, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.” That’s a prayer Paul is praying for the church in Rome. And we can pray that exact prayer over our families. The Psalms are full of prayers. Paul has prayers throughout all of his epistles. Start looking for prayers in the Bible and begin turning them into prayers for your family.
Personalize the prayer by paraphrasing the verse
You can read the exact verse as a prayer—or you can take the heart behind the scripture and personalize it to meet your family’s circumstances.
Praying this way opens up the entire Bible as a launching point to bring requests to God. As John Piper says, “Some people wonder how you can pray longer than five minutes, because they would lose things to pray for. But I say that if you open the Bible, start reading it, and pause at every verse and turn it into a prayer, then you can pray all day that way.”
What does this look like practically? Let’s take a verse most of us may be very familiar with: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Using that prayer as a guide for lifting upyour family could look something like this:
“God, thank you for my husband/wife and my sons/daughters. With whatever they find themselves doing today, would you help them to know that it matters because it’s an opportunity for them to bring you honor and glory? It’s so easy, Lord, to default to doing things for our own glory or even believing the lie that what we are doing is not important. Let neither of those be the case today with my family. Whether it’s cleaning a room, driving to work, interacting with neighbors, or doing homework, give them a mindset that you care about all of it—and they can do all to bring you glory. Amen.”
Combine verses to form personalized prayers
The best way to describe this strategy is to just give an example. The two verses we are using are:
“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” - Colossians 3:1
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” - Romans 12:2
Context matters so let’s say we’re going to use these verses to create a prayer for a teenage son back at home. Here we go:
“God, you know the temptation offered by this world. Would you help my son to seek the things that are above? Remind him today that because he has been raised to a new life with you Jesus, that he does not need to conform to the pattern of this world. Transform him today as he makes the effort to renew his mind and follow your will. Show him the way forward. And give him grace on the journey. Amen.”
Now, you could write out a prayer like that on a notecard for your spouse and each kid and pray it for them every day.And you can have separate ones if a new circumstance comes up, or you could keep adding new verses and make the prayer longer.
Coach, you will always have high demands on your schedule because of the nature of your profession. But even in the midst of the pressure you face, you can choose to prioritize your family by using God’s own words as a prayer back to him on their behalf.
