May 26, 2007
How to pray for your kids.
Having been a parent for 13 years (we have just become parents of a teenager!), I should have learned a thing or two about prayer for and with my children. Sadly, one of the biggest lessons is that I don’t do it often enough.
You’d think it would just come naturally – I pray on my own, so why not with my kids. But it actually takes practice, perseverance, and a bit of training (for the parent as much as the child). I find it kind of hard to pray with a kid who has been bouncing off the walls only seconds earlier, but I must acknowledge that the problem is mostly in my head. I think of prayer too much as a sober, spiritual activity, and not enough as a natural conversation with the One who knows me more intimately than anyone. I don’t think that Jesus is at all phased by the exuberance of children, so why should I be?
Last night with some friends we prayed for my 6 year old son who has a persistent stutter for which speech therapy has been ineffective. We’ve tried lots of different approaches to help him get over it, but looking back, the times when there has been improvement have been directly linked with times of specific prayer for the problem.
It was really amazing to see how my son responded. After tearing around the house like a mad thing, as soon as we began to pray he just calmed down, focused, and began to pray with us. “Jesus, please take my stutter away, and make it never come back!” After we’d prayed, our friend told my son that he’s a “champion”. He looked up, thought for a minute and said, “No I’m not, but Jesus is.” The conversation turned to what he wants to do when he grows up. “I don’t know what I’m going to be, but I’m going to be for Jesus anyway.”
Sure, we talk about Jesus in the home, we read the Scriptures together (not regularly enough, I might add), and yes children are easily influenced by the power of suggestion. But our son has never been one to tell us things just to make us happy. He’s a pretty straightforward kind of guy, and his response to the prayer was one of those genuine God moments.
“But what if God doesn’t heal him, and he ends up disappointed?” Yes, the thought did cross my mind. But if you really believe that God has your best interests at heart, this ends up being an unnecessary question. Having prayed we all feel confident that we don’t need to worry about Isaac’s stutter anymore – it’s in good hands.
Yes, I wish I had the facile way with prayer when I was raising my 4 boys as I do now. We always had family prayer led by Dad (me) around a table, from their babyhood on (of course at bedside too), but it was always liturgical to a degree most people today would think absurd or “playing church”, but I was a dyed in the wool high church Anglican. My boys didn’t seem to mind. When we moved into Eastern Orthodoxy, our prayer life as a family backed off a bit from ceremonial, but we learned a few more that we didn’t have as Anglicans, such as the metánia (praying or bowing on your knees with head and hands on the floor), kissing icons and so forth. But the prayer was simpler, shorter, more relaxed. This lasted as long as the boys were willing, till the onset of teen years. Then it gradually was replaced by reading the Bible together by turns after supper, and brief prayers before the icons sometimes in the evenings. Eventually, because everyone was getting lives of their own, it died out altogether. But my boys did learn to read by reading the scriptures aloud with us, and even though we don’t pray together anymore (I regret that!) I’m hoping the Lord will draw us all back into a form of prayer again when the boys are Dads themselves.