One of my most favorite things ever to do with children of any age is to pray. Their little hearts carry heavy burdens and for them to learn young that God cares about every aspect of their lives is so special.
You will be surprised of the prayers they send up to our Father in Heaven. Sometimes it's simply, "Thank you for fun!" The thing is, if we have hearts after God's own heart, we too care about the things one might consider small. After all, for a child small events have big feelings. Is God not our father? Like any parent, He cares about even the smallest things in our lives. Just like I care about everything going on in my children's lives.
If you ever get to work with me, you will notice I do the same thing at the end of every session I have. From my tiny people to my youth students, we circle up and hold hands and everyone gets a turn to pray. If you do not want to pray all you have to do is squeeze the person's hand next to you.
Sometimes only a couple pray, other times we are late to get out because everyone has something to talk to God about. This week at VBS, I had a stuffed lamb for part of the object lesson I got to teach. At the end of each session, we got in a circle and passed the lamb to pray. We had some pray for their dogs. We had one girl pray because she was sad and missed her pet fish that died. One young lady prayed "for our world and that we just all be nice again." Another young man prayed for his sick aunt and that she would not die.
Those are the children's words. Had I not given them the opportunity to pray, they may not have. What is special is that their friends got to hear them be bold and pray out loud and hopefully next time they will too. You never know what burdens little hearts carry. Prayer should be our first call to action and as normal to us as breathing. When we take away the preconceived notions of how elegant prayer should be and break it down to what it truly is, a conversation with the one who loves us most, we can take the time to appreciate prayer.
Prayer is as simple as talking to God. God wants us to have that relationship with Him and we are called to it. The cool part is , we don't even have to know what to say. Sometimes we truly have no words with what we are going through and as long as we take it to the King, the Spirit will intercede for us and God knows our hearts and what we need.
"In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans." Romans 8:26
If you take anything from this, let it be: Give every kid a chance to pray!
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