Guide My Feet: Prayers and Meditations on Loving and Working for Children

Guide My Feet: Prayers and Meditations on Loving and Working for Children

The founder of the Children's Defense Fund and author of  The Measure of Our Success  presents prayers and meditations to inspire all those, such as parents, teachers, and ministers, who work on the behalf of children.   Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, is one of the most important moral leaders in America. Her first book,  The Measure of Our Success  was a #1  New York Times  bestseller—spending 16 weeks on the list, selling more than 450,000 copies and garnering spectacular praise from Hillary Clinton, Maya Angelou, and Oprah Winfrey.  Guide My Feet  continues her crusade for the well-being of America's children by providing a counterweight to the lesson society is teaching this generation of children—to be soulless takers instead of empowered givers. Guide My Feet  is a collection of prayers and meditations gathered from Edelman's own holiday rituals and experiences and the writings of such inspiring leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Frederick Douglass. It urges readers to commit to and pray for strength and patience, and offers solace and direction for parents troubled by the commercialism and violence running rampant in today's society. Filled with wisdom, compassion and understanding, it provides an important spiritual and moral resource all caregivers can turn to as they strive to instill values, integrity, self-discipline and faith in children.   "I set out to write . . . a policy book," says America's premier children's advocate, "but out tumbled prayers instead." Indeed they did, both her own and others' prayers. Edelman focuses them all on children and their needs and arrays them in four parts, respectively devoted to love and parenting, personal faith and courage, justice for children, and creating community leadership and congregational commitment to children's welfare. They are overwhelmingly cries for help in fighting a world wallowing in evil and are probably best read in a selective, devotional manner rather than straight through. Those who, while they acknowledge the righteousness of Edelman's regard for children, do not share her bleak, beleaguered vision may find the whole book off-putting and lacking in the love of God that Jesus enjoined. EngageBeacon Press is convinced that even such readers will find the prayers eloquent and moving enough to warrant the largest first printing in its history--100,000 copies. Ray Olson In Guide My Feet: Prayers and Meditations on Loving and Working for Children , Marian Wright Edelman (founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund) revisits Bennettsville, South Carolina, to give a moving spiritual autobiography in which we learn how, as a youth, she felt 'wrapped up and rocked in a cradle of faith, song, prayer, ritual, and worship' by parents, community, church, and later, by caring adults at Spelman College. It would be impossible, according to Edelman, to recreate that same small-town childhood past for her own children; the prayers and meditations in Guide My Feet , reflect her ongoing struggle to teach and live the same enduring values of faith, integrity, and service upon which she was raised. — Midwest Book Review Marian Wright Edelman , civil rights activist, lawyer and author, is the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund which has sought to bring the plight of children to the attention of policy mkers and the public, and has been a vigorous advocate for the creation and funding of programs to improve children’s lives for over twenty years.