Thursday Thoughts on my Faith

"Mom.......don't forget to pray for us!" It's the sweetest (and sometimes a frustrating thing) my boys say at the end of each day. I made it a priority to pray with my boys at bedtime a few months ago and they swarmed to the idea like bees to honey. It's sweet because I am touched and pleased by how important this time is to them. However, sometimes I have to fight my flesh because I am so tired at the end of almost every day I just want to turn off the light and sit down to my nightly mug of tea! Sometimes it seem like just another chore but I trust that no matter how I feel about it, my nightly prayers are valuable to God and therefore valuable to my kids!

Most of the time I absolutely love praying for the kids at night. I take a deep breath, prepare my heart to enter into God's presence by letting go of the day's worries and hand over the 3 most precious little people in my life over to God. It is a sacred moment of sacrifice that I have come to crave.

I always start the prayer with praise for God. I'm trying to teach my children that it is good to praise Him since God inhabits our praise. Also, I hope to teach them about God by naming His attributes out loud. Next, I have a few things I pray for them on a regular basis.

1) I pray for their safety: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

2) I ask God to give them wisdom and discernment in situations where someone means to harm them (the underlying subtext here is, among other things like bullies, pedophiles).

3) I ask God to give them a thirst for righteousness and a thirst for His word.

4) I ask God's Spirit would work in their hearts and minds teaching them about Himself in a way they can understand (The subtext here is especially for Bear. His autistic brain twists things around in ways I often can't follow so I have to fully trust that God will speak to him concerning who He is when I can't. I have always trusted God to help me with teaching Bear about spiritual things and He continues to prove faithful in this area. Bear seems to understand the things of God better than anything else. He reads his Bible on his own and a devotional book and the most blessed things come out of his mouth!).

5) I ask that God would give them good, godly friends who will build them up.

I don't always pray all 5 of these things every night but I found out I always have to include the safety one. Bear reminds me of only that one if I forget. One night as I turned to leave Bear said, "Mom, aren't you going to pray for our safety?" Then he added, "Physical, mental, emotional and spiritual?" I guess you could say he's listening! He never reminds me of the other things, just that one. I am pleased that he may focus on that one because he understands that God is our ultimate help in times of trouble.

Before I sign off for the day I wanted to share a resource for praying for our kids that I just stumbled across. It's 40 Ways to Pray for Your Children from Christianity Today. I just printed this out and am excited to incorporate some of the things on their extensive list in my prayers for my kids each night!