Dear Charis. She's so wonderful, generally kind and helpful. She loves going to church. But I cannot see to get her excited about praying--she is just not amenable to the idea (no pun intended. okay, maybe I intended the pun just a little), and will in fact say "AMEN!" while I am praying in an apparent attemt to curtail my conversation.
For a week or two, I've been asking her who she wants to pray for each night, and her standard response, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is Diego. Dora's adventurous cousin. One night I did end up praying that somehow God would use Diego to help His children learn about and appreciate His creation, but I'm pretty sure that line of reasoning was lost on my two year old, and Abe mentioned that he didn't really think it was a good idea for me to be praying for a cartoon character. So we've been encouraging her to pray for others with needs--a growing baby in the belly (you know who you are), mommy's friend Stephanie who is thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, Great-grandma who fell and bruised her kidneys and may have broken a rib... but still, she thinks it is sort of a game, and continues to be silly even as I am praying.
So I told her that a very important part of our day is saying Thank You to God, who gives us all good things. I told her that we need to appreciate what he gives and does for us, and named some of her favorite things--food to eat, friends to play with, our family, a nice home, a church to belong to... After I had finished my mini-speech, Charis looked at me for a minute, as if piecing together what I had just said, looked up towards the ceiling and said, "THANK YOU, GOD!"
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We have trouble with this, too. I think it just must be so abstract to them. Ruby makes all sorts of interesting observations and asks questions all the time that show that she thinks about God, but sometimes it's hard to get her to pray. Every night we ask her to say thank you to God for something and to ask God for His help. One of the funniest was "Thank you God for pink ponies and orange kitties." Most often we get something like "thank you God for my toys and please help me to share at preschool." I also try to model praying throughout the day when I think of it by saying things like "look at the beautiful flowers -- thank you God for giving us flowers to enjoy!" I hope it makes it seem more natural that way. We also talk about telling God we're sorry when we do something wrong. We got a set of books from Christian Book Distributors about "Christopher Bear" that we like. "A Bad Day for Christopher Bear" tells about when Joe was grumpy and rude to everybody, even his teddy bear, so he told God he was sorry. It's not deep stuff, but I think telling God "thank you" and "sorry" and asking "please help me..." are good for where they're at -- it's the same kind of conversation skills that they're using all day.
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