Family Prayer Time

I love blogging about various things we do during our family devotions, because I want to be helpful to those who may be having a hard time trying to figure out what to do with your children. Because of our study through 1 Thessalonians the topic of prayer has been fresh in my mind. Do you ever have a hard time trying to figure out what you should pray for as a family? Well, here's a suggestion. I got the idea from the prayer calendar I put together for myself.

Each night after our family devotions, we devote a time of prayer together. When we first started doing this all we would do was pray for each other, and I started to think, “surely, we could be praying for more than ourselves.” So I laid a schedule for our prayer times so that each night of the week our prayers have a different focus. On Mondays we generally pray for any pressing needs related to our family, on Tuesdays we pray for our missionaries, on Thursdays we pray for our friends and/or for those who need Christ, and on Saturdays we pray for all the teachers in Sunday School and for the preaching of God’s word.

Here’s a suggestion for how to keep your friends in your prayers. Do you ever wonder what you should with all those family pictures you receive during the Christmas season? Sometimes they get placed on your fridge and other times they get thrown into the garbage. We have all the pictures we receive during Christmas in a drawer, and every Thursday night is our night to pray for friends. So we take 10 pictures from the drawer and divided it among the five of us and each of us take turns praying for the families represented in the picture we are given. It’s a great way to remind ourselves of the many friends that God has brought into our lives over the years, and when we get together with these friends during the year or when we correspond with them in some way we are able encourage them by telling them that we are praying for them as a family.