Thankfuls

Every night before we put the kids to bed, we all gather up on the couch or in the hallway by the kid's bedrooms and each person takes a turn saying two things that happened that day that they're thankful for and one thing that they're thinking about that's coming up.

We started doing this because my youngest son was a bit unsure about how to pray and despite my encouragement to "just talk to God like you were talking to a friend", he wouldn't pray before bedtime. I didn't want to push him and I didn't want him to fake it, so I shifted tactics. I asked him to tell me a couple things that happened each day that he was happy about and one thing that he was worried about.

Instantly, he started talking.

I smiled and listened to him go on and on and when he finished, I said, "Amen!" He looked a little surprised and said, "But I wasn't praying." I smiled again and told him, "Sure you were. There isn't some magic word or formula that you have to do to pray. You just talk to God like you did just now."

After that, I got the idea that we should have all the kids do this so that they can get comfortable with the idea of prayer and so that they have to actively think about the good things that happen to them every day. This helps them (and me) avoid taking the good things in life for granted.

I truly believe that even when the day sucks, there's still something good that happened that we can be thankful for. At the very least, the day could have been worse so I can be thankful that it wasn't that bad.