I always try to pray for our kids before they go to bed. My little one is the one who reminds me if I forget.

Yes, I sometimes forget about it and sometimes, well, I purposely forget it if I’m very tired or grouchy.

Yesterday night, while I was devouring one book (I will tell you about it when I finish it), my little one came and said, “Come and pray for us.” So, I first went to my daughter’s room. She is fourteen now and she got rid of all the night-lights. Big girls don’t need night-lights. Hooray!
In the dark, I sneaked in and knelt down to her bed side. She was about to drift to another world when she heard her mom’s footsteps. Then she turned around.

I said, “So, do you have any prayer request?”

She said, “Yes, one of my friends’ back is hurt. So we need to pray for him.”

Well, if you are not familiar with teenagers, let me tell you one of their “spiritual traits”. So, when you ask them if they have any prayer request, they ask your to pray to all the people in their school and neighborhood up to the president of the United States but for them.

I mean, I don’t mind praying to all these people, God have mercy, but I only have few minutes during the night and I am mainly interested to pray for my kids.

My daughter sometimes adds to the list, “The deer we saw yesterday . . .“ Bless her heart! She loves animals!

I mean, hello, I don’t have time to pray for the deer, the frog and the cats which don’t have any shelter during winter. Don’t get me wrong, I love animals but no, I can’t pray for all of them.

So, I always say, “Precious, your mama wants to pray for you, not for the whole world of people and animals. So, tell me what I can pray for you.”

Why do I ask? Well, there is no way for me to know about my teenagers’ life unless I ask. So, those few moments give me a quick bird’s eye view of their life.

So, yesterday night, after I heard a prayer request about her friend, I said, “I want to pray for you too. What can I pray for you?” She knows that Mama Bear won’t let go. So she said, “Well, I have a speech due tomorrow. Can you pray for me so that I do well?”

Well! I didn’t see her practicing her speech. She was working on it the other week days but not Sunday night. What was she doing yesterday night? She was watching on Netflix a detective show. Her dad “okayed” the show and she has been watching and following these brilliant lawyers who can read people’s mind. Now she is becoming good at reading our minds, lol.

When she said, “Pray for my speech tomorrow,” I was very upset with her. But I was in the dark and she can’t see my “very upset” face.

So, I quickly said, “Just stand before the class and do a speech on the detective show you just watched. Why do you worry about it? Just chill”

She came out of her bed, came closer to my face, in the dark, her nose touched my nose and she said, “Who are you? You sure are not my mom!”

We both laughed! Yes, that was not her mom. Her mom can’t say that about her school. I didn’t give her a fifteen minutes long lecture because she already identified my message from other “Just chill” messages.

Well, it is not easy to get information out of teenagers; specially true prayer requests unless you have time and  patient to dig more. But is that teenagers’ problem only or ours too?

I believe it is a problem of most of us, don’t you think so?

If you go to a prayer meeting, feeling really beaten up with life and feeling like quitting, do you say, “Can you guys pray for me because I feel like I’m drowning?”

I don’t know about you but me, I most probably choose to say: “Let’s pray for Czechoslovakia’s president because he just got diagnosed with cancer.”

That makes me look very spiritual and veers others’ attention away from my life.

But is that okay thing to do for us, Christians? I don’t think it is.

If we don’t feel comfortable to talk about our struggles to the group of believers we often see, we need to look for another group of people. We need to find people we feel comfortable with to say, “I am hitting rock bottom guys. Unless you pray for me, I feel like I’m losing it.” Or, “Guys, I feel like the devil is getting the best of me in this area and I’m losing the battle.”

We need to have those kinds of people. We need to have those people we can say to, “I blew it! AGAIN! Can you pray for me?”

“. . . confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” James 5:14a

You see, I believe it is not the prayer God is after here, but with the fact that we are letting the light come through others. When we invite others to our life, we are pretty much inviting “LIGHT” to come in and shun on our dark life.

Oh, it feels good! The devil’s constant accusation will vanish!

The Bible says, “Flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.” 2 Timothy 2:22

The message is this: “. . . pursue righteousness . . . along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart” because we can’t pursue righteousness alone! ///