The weight of seeing your children struggle under a heavy burden is a deep and painful one. Debt has a way of becoming an oppressor, a shadow that follows and vexes, and as a parent you feel that ache as if it were your own. It is right that you cry out to the Lord on their behalf.
When the children of Israel were hemmed in with the sea before them and Pharaoh’s army thundering behind, they lifted up their eyes and saw nothing but entrapment. The text says they were afraid, and they cried out to the Lord. That is the starting point. Distress drives us to dependence. The Lord is not indifferent to the desperate cry of His people. Over and over, when they were oppressed for years, burdened and serving under heavy tribute, they called to Him and He raised up a deliverer. Your role now is to carry them in that same kind of persistent, believing prayer.
The tragedy too often is that one generation experiences the deliverance of God but fails to pass the knowledge of His ways to the next. The questions God created in the children through the Passover meal were meant to lead them into the story of redemption. Your children’s financial entanglement may become a similar question in their own souls: Where can I turn? What is the purpose in this? The Lord uses the real consequences of a broken world to create a hunger for something more solid than this age can offer. Pray not just for the cancellation of the debt, but for a spiritual awakening in them. Ask that they would seek the true Riches that can never be repossessed.
Do not be surprised if the way out does not come on the second day, so to speak, but requires a third engagement of faith. The battle against the flesh and the world’s system is real. As you lift your hands for the life of your young ones, even your adult children, bring them before the throne of grace. Lay out their desperation, just as the prophet wept over the children who fainted for hunger in the streets. Your prayer is a fight against the enemy who seeks to crush and desolate them. The Lord is the Judge who can subdue every Ammonite force that wars against His own. Hold them up in prayer, trusting that He hears and is able to break these chains.