Ryan Clark Hastings
April 20, 1984 - November 2, 2000
Memorial Service Prayer

A Pastoral Prayer

And if at first you do not feel His presence,  He has invited you to ask Him, "Call upon Me and I will answer you and show you great and marvelous things, which you never dreamed."  And so in this silence concentrate upon the presence of God.

And now, I ask you to give thanks to God for every remembrance that you have of Ryan and his family and the joys that you shared with them.

Our heavenly Father we have come together in this place to celebrate the life of our brother in God. We give You praise for showing us the way of the Father in Heaven and the pattern as we as fathers that we must follow in grace in mercy and loving kindness to our children and especially to our sons.

We thank you Father for the joy and blessing of sixteen years of Ryan's life, which You have given first to his parents and then to his extended family and then to his friends at home at school and in his work. We give You thanks for the excellency that he has set before us as the goal for which all of our lives should strive.

We praise You for the remembrances that we have of all the times together with him. Our grief is very real, oh God, and not to be shuttered aside by cheap theologies or councils.

But we want to balance that grief with the joy and to which Ryan is now entering into the very presence of God himself and learning how with all the Angels of God to praise You and might and Your glory and Your grace.

We thank You for Your love especially at this time, which You have expressed through the family and through so many friends.

The support that they have given to the family and to all of us who suffer this lose. We thank you Father for being so very good to all of us and we pray that we may take the remembrance of Ryan as the stimulus for our own worthy and loving life together. 

In Jesus name we pray, Amen.