Beyond skinned knees and loose teeth

A third element of Bailey family worship that I wanted to write on is our time of prayer.

Little kids' prayer requests naturally gravitate towards personal, physical needs: skinned knees and loose teeth, etc. There's nothing wrong with that I suppose, but as parents we want to see our children grow up into mature Christians. So it's good if we can enlarge the horizons for prayer beyond themselves, especially beyond their external wants.

For our times of family worship we have daily and weekly prayer items. Daily items include what we read in the Bible that day, a family from church, one member of the Bailey family, one extended family member, one missionary we support, and special requests/needs from others. Once per week we pray for one country of the world using Operation World (a great missions resource).

I have gone back and forth on having the children pray for some of these items. I think it's best to do it, but it can be a little hard to work out.