Becoming Analise

Here are a few stories about Riley Grace from the past two weeks that will set the tone for a lesson on prayer! #1 Riley Grace’s teacher’s grandfather recently passed away, and Riley Grace was really struck by this event. She told me that she remembered when her grandmother passed away last year, and she didn’t want her teacher to be sad like she was. She decided to make her teacher a card and buy her some flowers! Riley Grace was explaining to me that her teacher didn’t need to be sad because her grandfather was in heaven. This spurred on a conversation about how we weren’t sure that he is in heaven because we weren’t aware of her teacher and her teacher’s family’s spiritual beliefs. We talked about how people who don’t believe in Jesus do not spend eternity with Him in heaven. What she took away from that conversation was the need to confirm that her teacher believed in Jesus. The following day, without my knowledge, Riley Grace asked her teacher if she b...

This summer, the Lord has really shown me the power of prayer! I have been in a season (for a while) of praying for something very specific in the life of our family – namely Patrick’s calling as a pastor. At the end of the summer, Patrick and I took a walk and he poured his heart out about some things that he had specifically been praying about and wrestling through about God’s calling on His life, God’s missional purpose for our family, and God’s timing. After much talking and listening and praying, God had spoken the same thing to both of us, which was so encouraging!! One night soon after our heart-to-heart about God’s will for our family in this season, I was talking to my mom about everything, and she had been praying about the EXACT SAME THING for Patrick that summer in the EXACT SAME MONTH that he had been wrestling in prayer– God led all three of us to pray for guidance, clarity, and the strength to be obedient about the same exact request, AND He answered i...

Prayer is a vital element of the Christian life, and yet far too often, it’s placed on the back-burner of our everyday lives. We remember to pray as sort of an afterthought when we’ve exhausted other options of trying to sort through a certain situation by ourselves with our own methods. I was contemplating prayer after I had a long and exhausting day of being emotional and easily irritable for no real reason … oh the joys of being a girl, huh? Everything that was happening was either aggravating me or making me anxious. There was a certain work situation, a particular conversation with my husband, an issue with Riley Grace, and on and on and on. There was no big thing that was really the matter, but I had allowed a lot of little things to pile up and overwhelm me. Throughout the course of the day, I had not focused on prayer as I should. At the end of the day as I was preparing for bed, I began to pray about my attitude. I prayed about the situation at work and the conversation with ...