Praying for people we know is a precious gift. It’s something accessible to us from a very early age, as this picture prayer book shows. I’ve often had a collage on my wall of photos of people I want to remember to pray for, or a photo album of the same. Here’s an idea to keep it accessible even to babies: make a picture prayer board book.
It’s simple: You buy a blank board book like this and glue pictures of people you know on each page. I’ve made this one for a one year old, including pictures of her parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles and cousins.
I’d recommend introducing a child to the book in one of the ways described below, but then leaving it out with other books, available for them to pray at any time they choose. You can also ask on another day if they’d like to pray with their prayer book.
There’s loads of ways you could pray with this. Here’s some:
(0+)
- Read through the book with the child, talking about who everyone is. Then repeat that, asking God to bless each person by name.
- Same as above, but asking God to help each person by name.
- Same as above, but asking God to do something specific you know each person needs help with, e.g. healing, help at work.
(6m+)
- Read through the book with the child, asking them to point to different people. Encourage them to turn the page to find certain people, then pray for that person, that God would bless/help/do something specific for them.
- As above, but encourage them to place their hand on the photo of the person as a sign of blessing them.
(1y+)
- Ask the child if they’d like to pray for people, and invite them to flick through the page to find people they’d like to pray for.
(2y+)
- Invite the child to flick through the page to find people they’d like to pray for and add a sticker to represent their prayer. You could have different coloured stickers for different prayers e.g. red for blessing from God, blue for healing, green for help at work or school, yellow for them to know Jesus is close to them.
- As above, but if you have laminated or covered the photos in your book, you could also blow bubbles over the photos as a sign of God’s blessings popping into people’s lives.
(3y+)
- Invite the child to pray for people in their book. Ask who’d they’d like to pray for and what they want to ask God to give that person.
- As above, only ask what they want to thank God for that person.
- As above again, except ask the child if they think God has a message for that person, a special word or a picture. Use this to pray for them together.