Past FHE Lesson: Prayer

Two weeks ago, we had my sister-in-law and two nieces visiting while her husband was away on a business trip, so I wanted to try and do a simple, quick activity that would hold the interest of the three oldest for at least a couple of minutes. I decided to focus on prayer (my two oldest are adorable praying, but don't yet understand how to pray completely and often elicit some giggles—point in fact: my oldest thanks Heavenly Father every single prayer for mommy and daddy having the loving kiss to live happily ever after and often asks if he can play Super Mario video games as much as he wants). We got a picture of a train that had the engine, two box cars, and a caboose. We talked about how, just like trains, prayers have an order we need to go in. We talked about how the engine is like the opening of a prayer (Dear Heavenly Father..) and how, while they'll all sound similar, people had different ways of opening prayers and that we needed to be respectful of that. Then we talked about the first box car and how that represented things that we can thank Heavenly Father for. We listed some things that we can be grateful for: food, blankets, homes, family, clothes, Elsa, Mario, Batman, and Iron Man were a couple of our answers. Then we talked about how the second box car was asking for things and explained how we need to make sure that what we were asking for were righteous desires and that, even if they were, it might not always be given when we expect or want because Heavenly Father's time isn't the same as ours and He knows much more than we do. We then talked about things we can ask for: being safe, being healthy, having missionary opportunities, etc. (there may have been asking to be a superhero thrown in there too...). Then we talked about how the caboose was the end of our prayer and how we do that (in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen) and talked about what it means when you say Amen at the end of someone else's prayer. Then we ended Family Home Evening. Feel free to play with trains or pretend your family is a train to finish off the night. My boys chugga-chugga-choo'd all the way down the stairs to bath that night. :)