I've been having trouble coming up with a blog post lately because we haven't been doing anything particularly noteworthy. Lots of swimming and sprinkler time, ice cream cones, sidewalk chalk and bubbles. Just soaking up summertime! We've also been reading like CRAZY! I posted on Facebook that we're trying to read 1000 books this summer! It's roughly 10 per day from Memorial Day to Labor Day. So we've read 130 books to our kids in the last 13 days. Yeesh!
Tonight though, we did something special that melted my heart! The kids had been painting rocks yesterday, so I took out a paint pen and wrote some words on some of our Lake Superior rocks.
The words are different things to pray for, as these are our new "prayer rocks." At dinnertime, we each took a turn choosing a rock and said a prayer for something in that category. The categories we have so far are:
- The Poor
- The Sick
- The World (as in people of the world, world peace, etc.)
- The Earth (as in global warming, protecting natural resources, etc.)
- The Church
- Our Friends
- Our Family
- Animals
- An "I'm Sorry" Prayer
- A "Thank You" Prayer
- A "Please" Prayer
- Free Choice
Micah chose first. He got "The Poor." First we had to define that for him and then he prayed for poor people in hospitals.
Liliana went next. She got "A Thank You Prayer" and she prayed "Thank you God for strawberries."
Jeremy went next and got "The World" and prayed for the children in the Democratic Republic of Congo (did you know there are 5 million orphans there?!?! 5 million!!! I want to bring them all home. Okay, maybe not all...but 2 or 3 for sure!)
I went last and got "The Church" and prayed for seminarians starting and finishing internship.
The best part was all throughout Liliana kept shouting "For Haiti!!! Pray for Haiti!" She's been really touched by our conversations about Haiti and tells anyone who will listen about how it's broken and she's going to send them band-aids and fix it. If only it were that easy babe!
Prayer rocks were a great way for us to bust out of our typical dinnertime prayer routine and to encourage the kids (and us) to think about all of the different ways and things we can pray for!
this is a great idea!! We used to do this on circles that I laminated and put on a shower ring, the kids would choose which one we would pray for and we had designated prayer times throughout the day so that way we would cover the whole ring. But we fell out of that habit...I think I may incorporate this into our day again!!! :)
ReplyDelete