E.T. Phone Home

We believe that one of the best things you can teach your children to do is to "phone home" to their Heavenly Father. There will come a time when we will not be able to help them or tell them what to do and they will need Divine guidance and perspective. Ken is really super good about this, but I've been trying to rely more on the Lord too. I hope that doesn't sound like I never pray or something. But I am an experimentor more then a meditator, so it is easier for me to feel guidance while I am in the act of "doing" rather then praying and thinking. I don't think there is any shame in going down a path only to feel that it is wrong and course-correct, so why bother mulling it over for hours, right.

We've been facing a number of challenges though lately and have alot of decisions that are weighing on us quite a bit. It just so happened that the past couple of months really caused our family to turn to prayer for comfort and help and to gain a much stronger testimony of it.

One thing is that Darin has been trying to work on his Duty to God and one of the goals he set was to say his prayers every morning and every night for a month. He has re-started this goal about 4 times and it has been really hard for him. I'm just proud of him that he is honest enough to admit what a struggle it has been, I know at his age that would be the last thing I would want to do. We were talking about it before family prayer one evening. One of the family prayers that turned into a ninety minute discussion and a 1 minute prayer because it is way past everyone's bedtime:-) We like those ones though because it is where our kids talk about goofy things and serious things as we jump from topic to topic. Somewhere in the jumble it turns out to all be very important even though it seems like a whole lot of nothingness and we don't even know what we are saying half the time. Ken and I try to never stop those nights.

Who knows how we got started on this but the gist of a discussion that Darin was having with us was that he wanted help remembering to say his prayers. I may have said something about jumping him from behind and threatening him with a knife or something or other and how he didn't want to be unprepared for the day and or...see it doesn't make any sense.

Later that night Ken and I sneaked up to his bathroom and drew on his mirrors a very memorable reminder though...

When Darin woke-up and walked into his bathroom that morning we totally scared him.  HA!  We still laugh about it to this day.  Darin admitted it totally made him say his prayers.  It also scared him everyday for week whenever he walked in first thing in the morning.

We drew on his mirrors a couple of other times but we forgot to take pictures.  Darin explicitly asked us not to make it so scary.  One of the times we drew, "The SSSnakes SSSay to SSSay your Prayers." With 5 snakes because he had just found 5 snakes while cleaning out our garden bed.  We also drew a cute little bunny in the corner so it wasn't so scary.  He really liked that mirror and it didn't scare him at all.  Even though they were snakes we made them smiley:-)

Anyway, it totally worked!  Darin said his prayers everyday in the morning and at night for a month and he was able to accomplish his goal he had been trying for.

In other prayer related news, Nathan at this time was having quite a few partial seizures and we were still going through testing.  He said many, many prayers for comfort and to not have a full-blown seizure.  Ken and I also offered many prayers on his behalf.  If there could be a silver lining to his experience with seizures it would be that he has grown so much closer to his Heavenly Father.  Nathan has such immense faith and one of the first things he does is turn to Heavenly Father to help him.  We are so proud of him!  He is such a huge example to me and we have seen the Lord's hand perform miracles with his body.

Like I said, Ken totally leads in this department.  He also handles the nighttime bed routine with the little girls.  He hasn't traveled as much lately so when he left on a his first business trip in 6 weeks I really noticed a huge change in the personal nighttime prayers that the girls would say.  They have really been thinking about what they want to pray about and personalizing it to what happened to them during the day. 

Right before Ken left I could hear him telling the girls how he would be leaving the next morning for his business trip.  They had a little talk about how Daddy has to travel for work and they asked if he could work at home.  Ken told them that normally he does work at home (they still don't really equate that to him working).  Then during Rose's prayer she asked if Heavenly Father would help her Daddy not have to work.  Seriously, the cutest thing ever!  Although, that is a prayer we are very grateful to have it go unanswered.