A prayer for my daughters and nieces

I just found this while looking for something else. It's a prayer of blessing for a new baby girl, but it's something I wish for my (now teen-aged) daughters and my nieces -- my sister's daughters Jana and Karina, as well as my daughters' friends -- who aren't really nieces, but I think of them that way anyway. Here's the prayer:

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O God,

All of our instincts tell us to pray for nothing but good things for this child,

But we know that this is self serving and short sighted.

So, we pray that you will give her whatever she needs to be your person.

We pray

You will give her enough joy to make her cheerful and serene

      and enough sorrow to make her big hearted and compassionate;

You will give her enough success to make her confident and hopeful

      and enough failure to keep her humble and dependent on you;

You will give her enough of the cross to make her life Jesus

      and that resurrection power will always be present in her life.

We pray, O God, that you will hold her so close to you side

      that the Evil one cannot touch her.

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from Eric Magnusson's blog entry of 2007-04-30