The Power of Prayer for Your Children: Encouragement for Busy Parents - Part 2

“We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.” C.S. Lewis

This week, we’re continuing to look at the power of prayer for your children. In my experience, the best place to start in prayer is stillness and the peace and joy of presence with God.

Stillness

For a mom, the concept of stillness can seem laughable. I no longer have little ones around me all day, but I do remember the time when even going to the bathroom often didn’t give me a moment of peace. Of course early morning and late night, when the kids were sleeping, were quiet. But those were often not ideal times for me to spend time in stillness with the Lord, just because I felt the intense need for sleep. Opportunities to rest were rare, and I knew I needed to take advantage of them when they came.

So what is a busy and fatigued mother to do? What is stillness with God, and how likely is a mom of young children is ever to find it?

Stillness certainly can be an extended quiet time of solitude, eliminating noise and distractions and just sitting still in God’s presence. Whenever you’re able to do this, do it! It can be tremendously beneficial, allowing us to hear God and to set aside our agenda and then speak to him out of the overflow of our hearts. Such a time of stillness can humble us as we acknowledge that our to-do list can wait, and the world will keep spinning while we stop planning and doing.

I love spending time in stillness with God because it keeps me from turning my time with him into a task to be accomplished. Because of my temperament, which leads me to value and emphasize productivity and efficiency, my quiet time with the Lord can become an agenda item kind of like grocery shopping or paying bills, something I plow through and then check off. I need a reminder that, more than praying through a list of requests or reading a set amount of Scripture, I just need to be with him, be genuine with him, enjoy his presence, and listen.

For a devoted time of stillness like this, setting a timer can be helpful. It keeps me from worrying about how much time is passing. It lets me just let go and truly focus on the presence of God. Twelve minutes seems to work really well for me, though sometimes it's twenty (and others, it's three)!

If carving out time for extended stillness with God is a challenge for you, I recommend putting it on your calendar formally at least quarterly and asking for support in this. I hope your spouse, parent, or a friend can do something fun for an hour or two with your children while you find a beautiful spot to be with God.

On a daily basis however, know that even taking just one minute to direct your brain to settle down and home in on the presence of God while you take three slow, deep, breaths – even this can do a lot to bring stillness.

Yielding

Once you have been still with the Lord, it’s helpful to focus on yielding. Otherwise, we often pray, but without seeking God and aiming to discern his will and be directed by him in prayer. With prayer like this, we are not seeking to join the work he is doing but to tell him how we want him to work. We end up with limited vision for our situation and little expectation of power. And frankly, our imagination just falls so short of what God is able and willing to do (Ephesians 3:20-21)! We are far better off asking him to bring us on board with what he is doing.

I recommend following up a time of stillness by acknowledging God in your circumstances and yielding to his will. A great place to start is just expressing your gratitude to him for what he’s done in your life recently and your adoration of who he is. The enemy is constantly telling us God is not good. We need the refreshment that comes from returning to and dwelling on what is true – God is so good. He is not only worthy of directing us, but he is faithful to direct us in goodness and love.

Petition and Intercession

Now, you are in a great place to lift up your requests to God. Open your heart to him and pour out the cares that are weighing heavy on you.

Ask him to be present in your children’s current struggles. Whether it’s difficult situations, challenges with friends or family members, character issues, health concerns, or anything else, when you bring those to God, you are submitting them to the only one who truly sees the situation fully and clearly, loves your children perfectly and completely, and has all the power needed to accomplish good in every situation.

Do you see the beautiful cycle happening when we pray? We aim to live in step with the Spirit. When we do so, God is forming our hearts, including our deepest desires. In intercession and petition, we bring these holy desires back to him. He responds to our petitions, which then increases our faith and intimacy.

What a beautiful partnership! He directs our hearts and forms right desires in us, and we bring those desires back to him, joining him as partners in his kingdom work.

What a joy for parents! As we pray, we are submitted to what he is accomplishing in the situation we are lifting up, and we can trust that the Holy Spirit is directing our prayers and that Christ himself is interceding for us. We can be at peace with his will and eagerly waiting for him to show himself strong in it, be glorified in it, and bring about what is good in it.

For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is *perfect toward him. 2 Chronicles 16:9

*loyal, whole, complete, peaceful

If you would be blessed by a week of encouragement in praying for your children, I invite you to join Savvy's free program - 7 Days to Becoming a Prayerful Parent. It's designed to inspire and equip you in developing a practice of praying for your children regularly. Click the button below to check it out!

7 Days to Becoming a Prayerful Parent

Check out Part 1 of The Power of Prayer for Your Children!

The Power of Prayer for Your Children: Encouragement for Busy Parents

Let me start by saying that this isn’t a post that aims to add one more duty or obligation to your already over-full list and then make you feel guilty about struggling to get to it. On the contrary, we will consider in this post and the next the WHY and the HOW of praying for your children, including the ways that a regular practice of lifting them up in prayer will actually lighten your load, not add to it.

Today, let’s talk about WHY to pray for your children and how it blesses them as well as you.

Prayer Blesses Your Children

The most important reason to pray for your children is because of its power to change things. We know from Scripture that (as unfathomable as it is) prayer is powerful to motivate God.

God is at work redeeming the world (including our children), and he invites us to participate in the work. What a privilege!

There are many times in Scripture that God directs people to ASK. In Genesis 18, God gave Abraham the opportunity to pray for Sodom, and God willingly responded to Abraham’s petitions for the city. In Exodus 32, God relented from his judgement against the idol-worshiping Israelites when Moses interceded for them. In John 5, Jesus invites the paralyzed man at Bethesda to ask for healing and then gives it to him.

Richard Foster said, “We are not locked into a preset, determinist future. Ours is an open, not a closed, universe. We are co-laborers with God…working with God to determine the outcome of events.”

Prayer Blesses You

Prayer is where we build our relationship with God, where we find intimacy with him. And, honestly, there is no greater gift on earth.

Of course, we know from any relationship we’ve ever been in that there is no intimacy without communication. Through prayer, we talk with God and we still ourselves to listen. We invite his guidance, conviction, correction, and care. In this intimacy, we connect to the peace he offers. Peace comes from seeking God, not from seeking peace.

Prayer Shapes Us

Prayer exercises our faith and reminds us that we can trust the character of God. The more we consistently entrust our cares to him, the more we learn that he is faithful.

Do you find yourself losing patience on busy days or feeling exasperated? This can by a symptom of inconsistency in prayer.

This is similar to what we see in the Israelites in Exodus, Chapter 16. Over and over again, they know to trust God for their daily needs. They’ve even seen undeniable divine provision multiple times. But as they deal with hunger in the desert, worry and fear creep in, and instead of talking with him about that and asking him for what they need, they continue on in fear until the need is so great, they can’t take it anymore, and they explode with an emotional outburst, full of complaint.

God does not intend for prayer to be like this - something that happens mostly during highly dramatic crisis points. Rather, it’s meant to be consistent, a way for us to walk with him moment-by-moment.

Keeping in step with the Spirit requires daily interaction with God, frequent reminders of his goodness and faithfulness, and intentional yielding to his leadership.

All of this contributes to our spiritual formation. We all probably know from experience and observation that we cannot change ourselves. Trying to conform to God’s ways will not truly reform us, because it doesn’t engage the depth of who we are and does not reach the motives behind what we do. Only the Holy Spirit (and our daily yielding to him) will truly form us spiritually.

Prayer Clarifies Reality

As we come to God in stillness, reality comes back into focus – the reality of our smallness (and the relative smallness of what we are dealing with – our needs, struggles, and sins), the reality of God’s greatness, and the reality of God’s goodness.

That’s certainly not to say that our struggles and concerns are small, only that they are miniscule and powerless in comparison with the creator of the universe who loves us and advocates and acts for us.

I don’t know if you needed a reminder of the value of praying for your children, but I hope this post gives you fresh inspiration and a refreshed desire to draw near to God on behalf of your children.

If so, I invite you to join Savvy's free program - 7 Days to Becoming a Prayerful Parent. It's designed to inspire and equip you in developing a practice of praying for your children regularly. Click the button below to check it out!

7 Days to Becoming a Prayerful Parent

Our next post will look at some specific ways a busy and often overwhelmed parent can develop an effective practice of prayer. It’s information designed to encourage and help. I hope you’ll check it out!

The Surprising Benefits of Reading Aloud

The idea of reading aloud might conjure the image of mom or dad cuddled up with a two or three-year-old, reading a delightful picture book before bedtime. If this is your idea of a read-aloud, you’re right on target, of course! Personally, I think it’s one of the great pleasures of parenting – enjoying one-on-one time with your child (or family time with multiple children) and sharing a fun, funny, touching, or thought provoking story.

We could all probably list a bunch of reasons why reading with your little one is a great idea. Language acquisition, relationship building, discipleship, fun – the list goes on and on. But, today we’re going to talk about some of the benefits of continuing read-alouds well past the picture-book stage.

Reading aloud (or sharing the reading) with an older child can allow you to tackle together a book that stretches past her current reading level. There may be a book you know your child would love right now, but the reading level would present such a challenge that her interest might wane. Hearing the book read aloud might get her over the hurdles she would find in reading it herself. With proper pauses, emphases, and vocal inflection she may be completely engaged with a book that would have just bogged her down if she were reading it herself. (If you’ve ever enjoyed the performance of a Shakespeare play that you could barely get through when reading it, then you know what I mean!) And while you read, your child is expanding her horizons with new vocabulary presented in an appropriate context and (hopefully) enjoying a story that presents ideas that nurture her intellect.

Reading aloud as your children get older can draw your hearts and minds closer. Of course, we love to see our children developing a love for independent reading. But reading out loud together doesn’t have to stop as independent reading develops. If you or an older child is doing the reading, then multiple age levels can be accommodated at once, and you can continue enjoying the sense of connection that comes from joint experience of a great story. There is no denying the power of stories in our lives – power for teaching, empathy, personal growth, and spiritual growth. These are displayed in a special way when we encounter them with others.

Reading aloud is a uniquely effective tool for discipleship. Remember that the best discipleship happens in times of peace and openness, not when we are correcting our children. One great advantage of reading aloud with your children is the opportunity for discussion after you read. Whether this happens immediately after reading or around the dinner table the next day, it gives you a chance to hear how your children are processing what you are reading and to guide them as they mature in discernment of people and situations. You can discuss whether each of you would have handled a situation in the same or a different way from how a character in the story handled it. You can help your children make connections between the story and truth they know from Scripture. And you can highlight the nuances in human existence, acknowledging how things are rarely as black and white as we want them to be. This can help us both lean into the Lord’s leadership and offer grace to those around us who struggle or fail when faced with a moral dilemma.

Reading aloud lets us take advantage of a child’s desire to stay up late to fit in a little more learning and a few more snuggles. Reading an engaging book aloud at nighttime doesn’t feel at all like a lesson. It can actually feel more like a relaxing vacation! It offers a great way to wind down and prepare for sleep, but you really are sneaking in some spiritual and/or intellectual stimulation while providing physical rest. And as our children get older, the sweet times of snuggling up together (or even being in the same room!) typically decrease. Read-alouds keep the door of togetherness open. Especially for your children who give and receive love with physical touch and closeness, this will be a blessing.

I was thrilled when my oldest, who was in her first year of college, came home for Thanksgiving with a book she was loving. It was from one of her classes, and she wanted us to read it aloud together during our holiday break. Just to be clear, we didn’t spend whole evenings adjourning to the couch after dinner for a couple of hours of reading. (Though if your family does that, more power to you!) But for 15 minutes or so after everyone had gotten ready for bed, we enjoyed diving into this story that meant so much to my daughter. We didn’t even get to finish the book in our few days together. But I treasured this little window into what my daughter was learning and enjoying in college as well as the chance to just be still together in peace and quiet, enjoying all the richness of a great story.