The Prayer Pot

Our Children's Pastor at church asked me to be a guest blogger and write about a new tradition our family has started. Here's what I wrote:

On our kitchen counter sits a white canister with big black letters on the side that say “TEA”. In a short time our kids will start to read and when they do they may have a few questions about why that canister says “TEA” when for the past few months they have been calling it “The Prayer Pot”.

Several months ago Pastor Art made pancakes in church and talked about feeding ourselves spiritually and feeding our families spiritually. We went home and talked about his message and decided that we needed to work on prayer as a family. We were already in the habit of praying together, but our kids would typically rattle off (as fast as they could) “Dear Jesus, thankyouforthisdaywejusthad. Amen”. As we talked about what we could do differently I remembered working with a woman several years ago who once mentioned that they had a prayer jar in their home and each night they would choose a name out of the jar to pray for. We decided that we would give it a try.

A couple of nights later we sat down as a family with stack of small pieces of paper. As we took turns calling out names of people we should be praying for I would write them down and put each piece of paper into the canister. We included family, friends, missionaries, teachers, pastors, people who need Jesus, politicians, and first responders in our city.

The kids LOVE the doing “The Prayer Pot” and are pretty good at making sure we never miss a night! Every night before bed we pass the canister around, each choose a piece of paper, and then take turns praying for whoevers name we happened to pick. When we are done we put the papers back and start all over the next night. We have no order to how the names come out - it's completely random.... well, random to us, but as some names are picked night after night we are wondering if God is specifically directing our prayers.

We have some very dear friends that lost their son two summers ago. During the week that he would have turned four we pulled their names out of our “Prayer Pot” every. Single. Night! How awesome that God would remind us to pray for them exactly during week when they would especially be missing their boy.

As a family we have been so excited about our new tradition that we've been telling other people about it. It's been fun to hear how other families have been trying it and are just as excited about it as we are. One family, who we've never met, heard about our prayer pot through the grapevine and they filled a jar with photos so it was easier for their young children who don't read. Isn't that a great idea?!

It's pretty simple... just a jar full of names... why not give it a try?!