From the Cradle to the Cross: The Lord's Prayer

The disciples asked Jesus if he would tell them how to pray.  Jesus answered with the Lord's Prayer and gave them the most famous and often quoted prayer.  There are entire books dedicated to uncovering the depths of this prayer and I know that 99% of it is well over Isaac's head, but I wanted to share with him the parts he could understand and begin to teach him the greatest prayer ever prayed.

Luckily, I found quite a few fun ideas online that made it pretty easy to introduce.

We spent a second talking about what prayer is:  talking to God.  I found this simple craft that makes praying hands and with a heart that you put inside.

We wrote Matthew 6:9-13 on it and glued it inside.  (And then he colored it dark brown so you can't really see the reference anymore...  :)

There were not shortage of coloring pages and here were 2 of my favorites:
-Bingo-dauber heart
-Child praying for friends (which I thought was fit well into this being a prayer for the Church rather than totally personal that I shared about yesterday)

I tried to focus on the parts of the prayer he could understand.  We talked about God being our Father.  This was actually a very good discussion that we had several times.  Isaac was pretty caught up on the fact that Matt was his father and so I would explain that God was his Father up in heaven.  It took a couple of days, but today when I asked him who his Father in heaven was his face lit up and he said, "God and Jesus!"  I'll take it.  :)

I also knew he would be able to grasp the idea of God being the provider of our food.  Remember our laborious baking of bread from Jesus feeds the 5,000 (a.k.a.  plopping frozen blobs of dough on a cookie sheet and letting them rise and baking them?).  Well, we like carbs, so we did that again.  I made two for each boy (and 2 for me!).  One I just baked normally, but the second one we rolled out and twisted into the shape of a pretzel and put egg whites and salt on them.  Monks used to make soft pretzels as a treat for their students when they learned their prayers.  The pretzel is supposed to look like arms folded in prayer.  I saw an idea here to use bread dough to make them and figured roll dough was pretty much the same thing.  We put butter on them when they came out of the oven.  They tasted like salty, buttery.... rolls.  Oh well.  We still ate them.  Like I said, we like carbs.  :)

My beautiful pretzel-roll

I found this cute idea for making a little praying guy (you'll have to scroll down the page a ways, and I adapted it some to make it fit the supplies I had on hand).  I used a hot glue gun so the pieces would stay on, so I did most of the putting together of this little thing, but I thought they turned out cute.  The boys were amused while I made them and enjoyed picking out their colors and such, and Isaac played with his a lot... but he named it after one of his uncles and didn't do much praying with it.  Oh well.  We had another discussion about prayer and about how anyone can talk to God about anything, so it wasn't a total flop.

We read the story of the Lord's Prayer from The Jesus Storybook Bible and our Picture That!: Bible Storybook.  I really liked The Jesus Storybook Bible (of course!).

I also downloaded a few little kid versions of the Lord's Prayer put to music.  I found 3 and got them all, but I probably like the Kidzup version best because it's in the NIV, so it's the easiest to explain.  The other two are great too, but the language is more archaic and not as kid friendly (The Wonder Kids and The Praise Baby Collection).  Every time I said, "Father who art in heaven," Isaac kept "correcting" me and saying, "No, Mommy.  It's heart, not art."  So I started going with "who is in heaven."  (I think it's so funny what kids hear.  For the longest time when I was a kid I thought the prayer for food was, "God is great, God is good, bletus thank him for our food.  Amen."  I had no idea what "bletus" meant, but I thought that's what was being said.  I finally figured out that it was "let us" only I still didn't understand and thought I was saying "lettuce" which made more sense to me since we were talking about food in the prayer...)

I also found these 3 ideas that I planned on doing but ran out of time.  I think they are worth checking out:
1.  Lord's Prayer File Folder Game.  I actually made this already, but we haven't used it yet.  It's got pictures on the words, so I think it would even work with pre-readers with some coaching.

2.  Make your own Lord's Prayer book.  I printed this out, but we haven't made it yet.
3.  Stained glass picture with praying hands.  (You'll have to scroll down the page quite a bit).  I think it's pretty and would be fun.

It was fun introducing Isaac to a new portion of Scripture and a new concept of God as his Father.  I know this will be a passage that we return to time and time again and that we'll uncover new truths each time.



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