Prayers for the Children

Jim Jarvis was homeless, living on the streets of east London. He was all of ten years old, an orphan whose mother likely died in a cholera outbreak. Jim attended the Ragged School for poor children. Its founder, Thomas John Barnardo (1845-1905), had been studying medicine at the London Hospital to become a medical missionary to China but was so troubled by the plight of poor children that he converted an unused donkey stable into a free school. In those days in London, public education was neither compulsory nor free. The students at The Donkey Stable, as it was affectionately called, learned reading and writing. Barnardo also made sure they had Bible lessons and learned the hymns. One evening, after a session by the fire, the children were excused to return home. All the children left, but Jim Jarvis stayed behind. Here’s how Barnardo described it. “Come now, my lad,” he said to Jim, “had you not better get home? It’s very late, and your mother will be looking for you.” “I ain’t got no mother,” Jim replied. Bernardo wanted to know more, “Where do you live?” “Don’t live nowhere,” Jim answered. Jim led his teacher to a secret place where homeless children gathered in a remote hay loft. The sight of orphaned boys huddled together for warmth, sleeping on hay, stayed with Barnardo. He sensed God was not calling him to become a missionary doctor in China but to provide homes for orphaned children. He opened his first home for orphaned boys in 1870. When he married Syrie three years later, they were given a wedding gift of a fifteen-year lease of a sixty-acre property with a lodge that they turned into a home for girls. By the time he died in 1905, 8,500 children were living in ninety-six homes run by the Barnardo’s.
Kurt Bestor wrote “Prayer of the Children” in anguish for the children caught in a civil war in his homeland of Yugoslavia, later divided into six republics. His 1997 song leads us into prayer for all God’s children: