My oldest daughter has an infectious personality. All throughout her seven years I have watched her make friends quickly and easily wherever we are as other kids seem to gravitate toward her kind openness. The same was true during her kindergarten year at school. Whenever she came home, I would ask her who her friends were to which she usually replied, “everyone in my class mommy.” It remained that way for most of the year. However, about half way through she began to come home consistently complaining about one girl who always snubbed her and would try to leave her out of games.
After hearing this for a few days, the Lord led me to pray with my daughter for this little girl. We asked that God would change her heart and make way for them to be friends. Wouldn’t you know that within three days that little girl was sticking up for Savanna when she thought others were bothering her and became a friend that she would play with consistently? The Lord heard the prayer of a five-year-old and her mom, thus marking the first of many answers to prayer in my daughter’s life and her history with God. We celebrated and discussed how God answered her prayer.
It may seem simple, but isn’t that the reason we pray because GOD LISTENS AND ANSWERS? Because Christ tore down “the dividing wall of hostility” (Eph. 2: 14, ESV) between us and God, we get to come boldly before His throne of grace.
Psalm 116:2 says, “Because he bends down to listen, I will pray as long as I have breath!” (NLT). Hallelujah! His kind attentiveness draws me in and brings me back over and over.
I want to be good at pointing out answers to prayer in the lives of my children, so that the Lord would use it to ignite faith in them. I long for them and the next generation to know prayer not just as religious duty but as our greatest privilege as children of God. Let us testify of the goodness of God before our children that they in turn might “…come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it” (Psalm 22:31, ESV).