"Fast!"

I had (and have) a mother who prayed with me on the fly for anything going on in my world -- so my 5-y-o Brooks coming to me to do the same makes complete sense to me. He's been home from preschool for these 2 weeks, and it's been fun! Just now he came one more time for me to pray about something -- and, as I prayed as requested, he whispered "Fast!" as he always does -- to remind me to tell God to answer the prayer quickly. And, as I always do, I responded by ending my prayer "and please do this quickly, Lord!"

I firmly believe that God teaches us to pray by answering our "silly little prayers" with a response that is full of respect and love, and that I help Brooks learn to pray "properly" by letting him learn that I respect his desires in prayer -- even if I also expect that his desires in prayer will change and mature as he does. I believed this with my older boys, too -- and am gratified to see their respect for prayer and their practice of it. Sometime I will share some of the amazing stories of how God answered "silly little prayers" in dramatic ways that amazed me, the mom who didn't really have faith that God cared to do something like make a rainbow appear suddenly on a rainy day with no sun or hope of sun breaking through when we prayed, or the prayer of little Josh for a porcupine in a yard that hadn't seen a porcupine in all the years I'd grown up there, and the porcupine that scrambled across it the next morning, or the . . .

Anyway, God leads us to respect Him and to ask Him for the "right things" (ie His Kingdom and His purposes, in His way and His time) by answering the prayers we pray out of "silliness" or "wrong motives" or even Brooks' continuing impatience by saying "YES!!!" as often as He can. He is the perfect parent, even though I'm not, and even though I don't deserve His gracious response to me and my boys.

Learn to pray by praying for what you want, how you want it. You will be amazed at the answers you get! And the best answer of all is when you don't even notice if the answer was "yes" or "no" or "what about this instead", because you're so taken by the One you're talking to that He becomes the only answer that matters!