bedtime prayers

Imagine 4 beautiful children all in clean PJ's with clean combed hair sitting nicely on a bed listening quietly while taking turns sharing highs and lows of their day. Imagine them now bowing their heads and praying beautiful well expressed prayers before bed.

*Ok, I'm sure that scene took place somewhere tonight, but it wasn't my house.
*There were 4 beautiful children. (It's my blog and they are my kids so I'm allowed to say that.)
*They all had on PJ's of sort but nobody had clean hair and it certainly wasn't combed.
*We were all on a bed but sitting is probably not an accurate verb.
*Taking turns sharing highs and lows, yes, listening quietly to each other? Um...no...

Mommy was trying hard to listen. This was especially hard to do with Iain's feet in my face, Kyle chasing Fiona off the bed, Rhia giggling because Teagan was taking SOOO long, and Teagan declaring she had 3 highs and 3 lows! (At this point I must explain. We do this every night usually at dinnertime. But tonight Daddy was at a meeting and Mommy was anxious to get them upstairs so I decided to add this to bedtime. Teagan doesn't really get it. She shares something about her day, but the whole highs and lows is still a bit too abstract for her. HOWEVER, she will vehamently argue with you if you try to tell her that what she is describing is actually a high and not a low. AND if you interrupt her OR laugh she will INSIST on starting over.)

*Bowing heads and praying? Yes. Well expressed? Well, I truly believe that God loves to hear little children talk to him no matter how they express their words. One child was thanking God for all the expensive gifts he might receive in the future, while another was praising God that no one in her class got a tally today. A third was pleading with God to help 2 of his friends in school not get their bears down (the discipline system), and a 4th insisted she would do it on her own in spite of 3 offers to assist her. In fact with each assist, she started over! All the food we ate today has been very blessed and although there was a request for Mommy and Daddy to learn to obey "me", I trust that God knew the heart of this request.

Of course this time of praying took a few minutes and it was not without incident. Mommy even included in her prayer that Teagan would put her head on her own pillow and stop playing with Rhia's eyes and that Iain would stop touching Kyle with his feet and at one point Mommy even slapped the leg of a guilty party. (As is turns out, I slapped the wrong leg. So then I prayed for forgiveness.) Once we were finished the kids burst into laughter at the fact that I, in their words, "Whacked" the wrong kid. I didn't like that word so I tried to correct them and say "slapped" but it came out, "Swacked" which brought about an addition round of laughter.

I finally got everyone to their own rooms and settled in their own beds. What a night. I bet that Mom I mentioned at the beginning has all her laundry folded and put away, her house is dusted and organized, and she has meals planned for the next 3 weeks. Yeah, well... like I said, not my house.

Blessed to serve a God who listens to the hearts of our prayers and loves my children,
Momofkrit and Woj,
KT