Bedtime prayers with Bella

For eons now, I've been working to get Bella to pray out loud. We always pray, mind you, but up until a few months ago it's been me doing all the praying. Bella's prone to admitting that she has "stage nervousness" (where she learned that term I'll never know), so I guess you could say she has "praying-out-loud nervousness" too.

Finally, a few months ago, she began to pray out loud by repeating my prayers. You know what it's like when you make a cell phone call and can hear your own echo in the background? Very distracting. Well, that's what praying with Bella was like for several months as she warmed up to the idea of praying out loud: me praying, Bella echoing.

She is beginning to compose her own prayers, now, and usually she wants to pray for someone who's sick. But she makes a profound mistake every time. "Thank you, God, for Sage to get well." In her five-year-old syntax, she verbalizes her prayer not as a request, but as a thanksgiving.

I wonder, really, whether it's a mistake at all -- or indication of child-like trust.

You know what I think? I've been trying to teach my little girl how to pray; suddenly, she's teaching me.

Talk about a good mail day ...

Woohoo! Passports arrived today, much more quickly than anticipated! (If I had a working digital camera, I'd post a LOVELY photo). The kids and I were really excited. The passports were mailed in separate envelopes, so each of the kids opened their own, which was pretty cool. (Of course, they both griped about how they looked in their pictures; in reality, the pictures were pretty good.) Anyway, we're one more tiny step forward toward a site visit to Ireland.

Another cool thing -- the World Harvest newsletter came in the same batch of mail, and there's an article in it on the Mission Apprenticeship Team (one of the teams we plan to visit). It was neat to read about aspects of the team's ministry and challenges we hadn't yet talked with them about.

Well, I promise to blog on a different topic next time. Some options: what I'm doing when I'm not blogging; "the book list"; sights I've noticed along HWY 411 that have given me cause to wonder; some great bit of poetry. Hmmm -- wonder which one it will be.