Tag: bedtime

Bedtime conversations

My last post hinted at the wild conversations that can happen with children when bedtime is filled with songs, stories, and prayers. My own kids shared a bedroom for years because of a tight budget, so our bedtime ritual involved them together. Many of our most important conversations happened during those years.

            No topic was forbidden. My children’s defenses would be down, and sometimes they’d blurt out rather extraordinary things.

Claire: Why do angels always carry torches?

Mom: I didn’t know they did. Have you seen an angel?

Claire: Yeah, the other day I ran around the corner of Andrew’s house and there was an angel.

Mom: Oh wow, did you talk?

Claire: Yeah. I told him I was sorry for saying bad words.

            As a missionary kid and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship alum, I’m stuck for life with an internal theology monitor. My invisible antennas went up as my daughter spoke. Claire’s angelic encounter seemed to pass scriptural tests: it was unexpected and it prompted repentance. I couldn’t recall any Bible story book illustrations of angels carrying torches (for Brits, flaming torches, not flashlights). But the mental image is beautiful, and completely consonant with biblical imagery.

After singing Christmas carols, before we trooped up to their room for the rest of bedtime.

It was at bedtime that my children told me—together—that they’d decided they wanted to be baptized.

It was at bedtime that they told me they hoped a family member traveling abroad would die instead of coming home.

            It was at bedtime that they told me they’d conferred with each other and agreed that they hoped a family member traveling abroad would die instead of coming home. I held in my shock and did not reproach them but asked why. Their answer was a revelation to me, helping me understand that the family environment needed to be made safer for them.

            Some years later, when my kids had their own rooms, Graham and I had a bedtime conversation and prayer very like that in Isaiah and the Worry Pack. It was a God-encounter for both of us. A week or so later, I asked him how his sleep had been. “OK,” he said. “If I’m having trouble sleeping, I just run a mini-version of ‘The Worry Pack’ like a video in my mind.”

            That was when the thought came to me that perhaps someday I should make our experience into a book.

            Claire was in junior high when she told me at bedtime that some peers at school made fun of a disabled classmate and she had joined in. Later, on her own initiative, she had apologized tearfully to the girl, and they became friends.

Finally, there were the daytime conversations that emerged from our bedtime sharing. One fall afternoon when Claire was three, we were driving in the neighborhood and I called her attention to a small maple tree whose leaves were afire. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” I rhapsodized.

            Claire burst out from the backseat, “I love God!”

            Bedtime talks and readings had formed her to see the world theologically, as made and sustained by God.

My children were no more creative than the children in your life are; they had no more capacity for entering God’s presence than your children have. So as you wake up to God’s love and learn new, fruitful ways to pray, share your experiences with them. Of course what you share needs to be at their level, and it needs to connect naturally with their lives and struggles.

            There’s no telling what new adventures you’ll have together. And sometimes you’ll find your young ones leading the way.

So many ways to pray with kids

Praying with children is one of the most important things we can do to foster their life with God.

            My kids and I prayed before meals throughout their growing-up years, and spontaneously anytime they were hurt, frightened, or sick. But the most important time for prayer was bedtime. After I read a picture book or a middle-grade book chapter to them, and a Bible story, we took turns praying. Then I sang something peaceful as they drifted off to sleep. This practice calmed and nurtured all of us and bore sometimes surprising fruit.

            Our routine was modeled on my own experiences growing up in a large family with missionary/teacher parents.

Prayer in the Land of Gorings

Not all those early experiences of prayer were nourishing. Our dad would periodically decide to lead family devotions following breakfast. It always fell flat—I can’t remember a single time that morning devotions didn’t feel awkward and pedantic, with Dad posing schoolroom-type questions that failed to engage our lives or our struggles. The practice always petered out after a few dutiful stabs at this perceived obligation.

            Bedtime prayers were a whole other story. For years—beginning in our eldest sister’s infancy—little Gorings gathered in PJs each night for the enchantment of a poem or two read aloud, followed by a story or book chapter, a Bible story, humorous songs and a hymn or two, and finally prayers. It was our warmest time together; it grew our imaginations and helped to form an indelible family culture that keeps my siblings and me deeply bonded to this day. We have all remained in the faith.

Arrayed in our pajamas just before going to bed and starting the nightly ritual. That’s me on the left. Three more siblings were yet to come! And then my parents adopted two more when the rest of us had grown into young adults.

Bedtime is best

What makes bedtime a particularly rich time to pray with our little ones? I think there are a couple of reasons.

            First, as they become sleepy children’s normal defenses go down. Especially if the parent is unhurried and attentive at bedtime, children may get in touch with tender or sad feelings and blurt out things they’d not say in daylight.

            It is a gift just to find words for our feelings and experiences. Then they can be brought to God in prayers of thanksgiving and petition.

Two favorite photos of my kids in childhood

            Second, bedtime is a natural time to think back on the day and look forward to what is coming. Cindy Bunch’s Be Kind to Yourself (IVP, 2020) wasn’t around when I was a young mom, but if it had been, I’m pretty sure I would have used its simple examen questions—what’s bugging you? what’s bringing you joy?—to help my kids articulate hardships of the past day and places where they had sensed God’s presence.

Kid-friendly prayers

Prayer with children can take other forms too. My picture book Isaiah and the Worry Pack (IVP Kids, 2021) models an imaginative way of meeting God through guided imagery. It’s based on an experience my son Graham and I had together one night when he struggled with some big worries. Jared Patrick Boyd suggests ways to pray Scripture imaginatively with children in Imaginative Prayer (IVP, 2017).

            Memorized prayers can be helpful too. When I was a child, we often recited “Now I Lay Me.” Its mention of death would make it off-putting to many parents nowadays. But falling asleep is entering another country, mysterious and affording children even less control than they have over their waking hours. Maybe it’s not so bad to provide our kids a prayer that contains their fears within a little rhyme that expects God to hold them in both waking and sleeping, living and dying.

            Some lovely prayers to read and perhaps memorize with kids—in daytime as well as at bedtime—can be found in Traci Smith’s Prayers for Faithful Families (Beaming Books, 2020). And a great resource is coming soon from IVP Kids: Little Prayers for Ordinary Days by Tish Harrison Warren, Flo Paris Oakes, and Katy Hutson (2022).

Singing as prayer

Singing can be a prayer practice too, of course. I adopted my daughter Claire at age one after she had suffered serious neglect and starvation in an institution during her first six months of life. As she grew, she became especially fond of the hymn “Children of the Heavenly Father.” For years she requested it practically every night, along with prayers that she wouldn’t have bad dreams.

Claire at 18 months, now in the US, with my mother, Susy Goring, who had literally rescued her from death.

            Years later Claire was at the National Registrar’s office in her birth country, Colombia. She’d entered to apply for her identity card so that her dual citizenship could be recognized. An encounter with the director of the new digital population database led to an amazing bonus: printouts of the birth, ID, and death records of her birth mother!

            Holding these documents, Claire wandered out onto Plaza Bolívar toward the national cathedral while waiting for a friend to complete an errand of her own.

            Then from inside the huge church she heard music—the organist at this Colombian Roman Catholic cathedral dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus began playing a Swedish Lutheran hymn, “Children of the Heavenly Father.”

            Claire told me later that her heart began pounding in surprised awe. But she was also flooded with peace. Even though she’d just learned that she’d never meet her birth mother in this life, she might be able to track down other members of her biological family, now that she had her mom’s documents. And the hymn reminded her that the gentle, attentive Father she had met in bedtime prayers would be with her. All along God had been bearing her, as the hymn says, “in his mighty arms.”

Note: I have many stories of funny and extraordinary conversations about God that arose out of prayers with my kids. Too many to tell in one post! So I welcome you to subscribe (above right, next to the title of this post) if you’d like to read them in the coming weeks.