Family Prayer Time

In my very first post (not so very long ago!), I posted what we do during family prayers. To expand on that a bit, our prayer time occurs in the same place each evening. We have a little 'icon corner' (it's really located on the middle of a wall next to our dining table). We have a shelf with our various prayer books, bibles and children's bibles, candles, incense and icons. On the wall above the shelf, are our family icons (icons of our patron saints) surroudning a large cross with 6 little icons on it depicting the life of Christ, the person around whom our lives should center. Every family, should have one of these! A place to gather together and prayer. A sacred place in every home.

This next week, we are making a new addition to our's. In an attempt to help teach our children to pray at an early age, we are making a special prayer line for our icon wall. We're going to hang vertically on the wall next to the icons a long piece of thick ribbon. Then, we are going to clip pictures of people and things we want to pray for. These can be regular photos or magazine and newspaper cutouts (say of hungry people, our President or the soldiers in Iraq, etc.). This visual reminder will be especially valuable to the children. My little girls are just 1 and 2, but they can identify people and pictures and we can teach them a very simple prayer to say for them at prayer time. Jesse and I can more specifically pray for individuals, and it will just be a good reminder to pray as we walk by the icon corner everyday and see familiar faces looking out on us.

I encourage you to do this and make it a special project with your children. Let your children choose the pictures of people they want to prayer for. You can even let them hold the pictures of the people they will get to pray for during prayer time.