Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

I’m beginning to think that learning to pray is a lifelong process.  The closer our relationship with God, the better we learn how to communicate with Him.

I’m seeing flashes of that with the boys.  There are nights, when it seems like they really connect with heaven.  Even Gage, unprompted, has broken into a prayer of thanksgiving, followed by a simple request for good sleep and rain.

However…being the children that they are, there are still some off the wall requests that get lobbed toward the throne of God.  I’ll try to chronicle a few of them for your reading pleasure.

At an earlier age, Griffin thanked our Creator for the color red and the number 7.  The only explanation I have is that it was either a really interesting week in preschool or he was channeling Sesame Street.

As he grew, my oldest boy became quite adept at praying for everybody, and I mean everybody.  He went through every name he knew, then stated a general “help everybody else” for those he didn’t know.  One time, he changed his prayer to “help everybody except the bad guys” and then started telling God, in detail, what he’d do to the bad guys if they tried to kidnap him.  I had to finally break in on him and explain how Jesus wanted us to pray for our enemies, not pray for ways that we’d be able to hurt them.

Gage is where most of these nuggets of humor come from.  For the longest time, his prayers consisted of praying that all his favorite cartoon characters would get good sleep.  The cast of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Little Einsteins, and Chugington should have been some of the most rested and refreshed cartoons in the business.

As he’s grown, so has his range of requests.  A few weeks ago, my mother found a stray kitten and fell in love with it.  The boys did to.  A couple of nights after she adopted it, Gage was saying his prayers and threw in, “Please help Mammy find another cat so Griffin can have one and I can have one.”  We quickly interceded on her behalf and prayed to the contrary.  Had his request succeeded, I’m sure he’d have tried to pray a whole zoo down on her head.

Recently, his prayers tend toward thanking God for the rain and for trains, but Wednesday night I guess he decided that God was answering his petitions for precipitation so well that he’d go for broke and request something a little more personal.  Out of nowhere he threw in, “Thank you for letting us go to Chuck E. Cheese and the mall tomorrow.”  What!?  Welllll…James did say, “…ye have not because ye ask not (James 4:2).”  I’m just fairly certain he didn’t have a pizza peddling rodent in mind when he wrote that particular scripture.

Yup.  Prayer time can be pretty interesting on any given day.  If you have a moment to respond, I’d love to hear about the humorous things your kids have prayed for!