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Prayer is a vital part of our faith. Our communication with God is not only necessary to our relationship with Him, but He craves it! Isn’t that a beautiful thing; that the creator of the universe craves our prayers?! I want my children to know just how important and satisfying a healthy prayer life can be. Introducing a prayer jar is our first step toward learning to talk to God.

Christ tells us clearly how we should pray. The Lord’s Prayer is something I’ve had memorized for a long time and I want to work towards helping my kiddos memorize it as well. When it comes to applying that structure to our everyday prayers though, the attention span of a five, three, and twenty-month old doesn’t hold up so well. That’s why I decided a prayer jar was a good place to start.

A prayer jar allows us to focus on one aspect of prayer at a time while applying it to each child personally.

Here’s how our prayer jar works:

To create our jar I picked up some oversized craft sticks and wrote a simple prompt on each one:

• Obedience and self-control
• our leaders
• our community
• God’s forgiveness
• something you need
• relationship with God
• a sibling
• relationship with others
• friends
• our church
• something you want
• a family member
• health
• praise God!

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The kids take turns choosing a stick out of the jar and we discuss different things that they could pray for in that category. For example, when Squeaks pulled out the stick with “friends” written on it, we talked about choosing one friend to pray for, praying for her friends as a group, or praying that she is a good friend to others. Once she chose to pray for a specific friend we talked about what kind of things that friend might need. Were they sick? Were they struggling with something? Or was she simply thankful to have that person as a friend? I loved how this process helped her to think outside herself and consider other people’s needs.

We did hit a hiccup when Little Dude pulled out the “something you want” stick and immediately shouted “toys!” I’ll admit I stumbled over that one. In the future I’ll be better prepared to acknowledge his desire, but also point out that God doesn’t always give us what we want. Sometimes He says yes! But sometimes God knows what we want might not be good for us. I’m learning through this process too. 🙂

 

Another thing I love about our prayer jar is that more sticks can always be added! If we have specific prayer requests we can simply write it on a stick and add it in. As the kids grow they can also start pulling out multiple sticks. I can wait to hear their prayer lives develop!

Interested in starting your own prayer jar?!

I created a lid cover with the Lord’s Prayer (as a reminder and motivation to help the kiddos learn it) plus a few fun tags to decorate our jar and I’d love to share them with you. Download and print them HERE. The lid cover fits a standard wide mouth mason jar and I just used fun ribbon to attach the decorative tags.

As a little extra bonus I added a cool Lord’s Prayer print to my free printables library. Just for my lovely friends who are signed up for my newsletter. Enjoy!

Take me to the FREE Printables Library!

How are you helping your little ones develop their prayer lives?