Faith Reflection | power of prayer | Jubilee of Hope | Hope-2025
Does Family Change Make You Worry?
We Tomlins are an Army family. Moving every two to three years is a reality of our family’s life. Each time that Permanent Change of Station season — “PCS season” as we call it — comes around, I feel a bit of hope but simultaneously dread of what’s to come. I find myself awake in the middle of the night, spinning with questions I can’t possibly answer or control:
How much time will my husband spend deployed or in the field in this Army job? Will the kids have a good school? Will they make friends? Will they be happy? I definitely earn a gold star for pre-PCS worrying!
Elizabeth Ann Seton Understands the Concerns of Your Heart
Yet there can and must be room for hope in this life quasi-nomadic lifestyle, and over the years I have found hope with the accompaniment of the Church’s first American-born saint, Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. I have looked to Elizabeth as an intercessor during times of change to shift from a posture of hand-wringing worry to hands-folded prayer.
What worries me most about moving is how it will affect my children. Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton understands that concern. Before becoming a religious sister, Elizabeth Ann Seton was a wife and mother of five children. Two of her sons served in the US Navy, so I feel a kinship with her military affiliation. Elizabeth’s own mother died when Elizabeth was a young child, so she grew up not knowing a mother’s love. When she eventually married and had children, she cared fervently for her growing family.
Elizabeth was no stranger to experiences that might provoke worry, and like most mothers, her children’s well-being was a paramount concern, especially as her husband’s health declined from tuberculosis, which at that time was incurable. In an effort to bring comfort to her husband’s medical condition, Elizabeth traveled with her husband and one of her daughters from New York to Livorno, Italy, where they had friends, and where the warmer air was thought to bring relief to tubercular patients.
However, upon arriving to Italy, Elizabeth’s husband’s condition declined and they were detained in a quarantine area for the sick: a lazaretto in Italian, reminiscent of Saint Lazarus. The conditions in the lazaretto were so harsh that Elizabeth played jump rope with her daughter, not only to lift the child’s spirits but to keep the child warm!
Eventually Elizabeth came to understand that her husband was dying. She wrote to her friends that there was “no hope of recovery in the view of MORTAL HOPE” (the capital letters were in Elizabeth’s original letter). Eternal hope remained. She continued, “yet how gracious is the Lord who strengthens my poor soul." Elizabeth’s faith in God buoyed her virtue of hope during this time so much that she reflected, “Sometimes I feel so assured that the guardian Angel is immediately present that I look from my book and can hardly be persuaded that I was not touched.”
Elizabeth felt the grief of losing her husband and the worry of how to continue to raise five children when women were not financial providers for the family. These worries sometimes overwhelmed Elizabeth, yet when she felt this worry, she would turn to prayer. She wrote, that even when her eyes were swollen from crying, “I must close them and lift up my heart.”
Why Should I Turn to Intercessory Prayer?
Especially in conversations with non-Catholics, I have encountered statements like, “I pray directly to Jesus, so I don’t need to pray to a saint.” We pray with the saints and ask for their intercession. Jesus is the one intercessor on behalf of all humanity to the Father (CCC 2634). In the age of the Church, Christian intercessory prayer participates in Christ's intercession, as an expression of the communion of saints (CCC 2635).
When we ask for another person’s prayers, we are asking them for their intercession — to join with us in taking prayers to Christ. This is intercessory prayer. Asking a saint in heaven for their intercession moves our prayer beyond the visible Christian community to the Communion of Saints in heaven. Intercessory prayer is the prayer of our extended Church family to Jesus.
I turn to Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton’s intercession during times of change for my family, because I know that as a wife and a mother, she experienced similar concerns of my heart. During her hardships, she formed prayers that would benefit my life, and so I ask her to take these prayers to Jesus with me. In this, I feel solidarity and less alone in my troubles.
A Mother’s Prayer with Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton
The next time you feel worried about your family, I offer you this intercessory prayer:
Saint Elizabeth, you are a role model of the heroic virtue of hope. You know the concerns of my heart as a mother [name your concerns — such as an Army move!]. Through your intercession to our Lord Jesus, help me to increase in hope and to blot out worry in my life. Amen.
For the Jubilee of Hope, our writers reflect on prayer as a source of hope in their lives.
Copyright 2025 Elizabeth Tomlin
Images: Holy Cross Family Ministries