Known for Our Prayers

It’s so important to sit and listen to children. Recently, I sat with fifth-grader Reggie who had broken his foot.

“Isn’t the cast coming off next Monday?” I asked.

“Yes, and I can hardly wait!” he said.

“I’ve been praying for you,” I told him.

“I bet you pray for me every night before you go to bed,” he said.

“It’s more than that,” I commented. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I pray for you.” Then I teased him. “You think I’d at least get a good night’s sleep, but no, sometimes I wake up worried about you in the night.”

Then he said to me with all the gravity of an adult with the weight of the world on his shoulders: “Sometimes I wake up in the night, worried too. And then I pray, too... for my father who died.”

My heart was so moved for this precious child. We talked more and I tried to assure him that he can trust God to do the right and just thing every time, especially with his Dad.

Not more than an hour later, a second-grader asked if she could share a prayer request with her Kids Club friends. She spoke candidly about her pain in having her mom move away. When she asked for prayer, the children did pray. And then a dozen more hands went up — more kids with prayer requests. It’s not always like that in Club, to be honest. Sometimes the kids are rude or skeptical during prayer. But this day seemed a special day for prayer.

Earlier that day I had spent an extended time in prayer with a volunteer who comes weekly to pray. We had seen our prayers answered that morning when one of the community women came for Bible Study and signed up to join us for at a Christian women’s event. How thankful I was for that day of prayer!

It made me think of an earlier time when I was visiting a neigh- borhood home. While I talked with the Mom a sweet preschool- er sat on the stairs, half-listening and half-babbling in baby talk. right as I was ready to leave the little girl said “Ah-MEN!” Her mom laughed. “She knows when you come, you pray,” she said. Well, that day a little child beat me to it.

- Denise