What does it mean to young children when they hear adults say, “Our prayers have been answered”? I can hear it now. The conversation might sound like this:

“When we pray,” you say, “we are talking to God.”

“When you pray,” your child asks, “does God answer out loud?”

Young children interpret everything literally. Their senses—what they see, hear, smell, taste or touch–help them understand more clearly and remember longer.

What can you do to help your young child begin to understand the concept of answered prayer? How can you make it more part of your child’s experience, easier to grasp?

Prayers aren’t often answered in a flash, in a twinkling of an eye. It usually takes longer  to see an answer, more like the time it takes a plant to grow. If you and your child check a plant’s daily growth, your child will think it’s taking forever, but the child will be able to identify the stages of growing–getting taller, leafing, budding, and blossoming. Your child will know that something good is happening.

To help connect the idea of your prayers for Nana to an answer, you need a visual aid. Help your child create aPrayerGarden. Here’s how:

1. Hang a strip of paper from near the floor to as high as you want it to be. With crayons, magic markers, etc. draw soil at the bottom of the paper. (NOTE: If this is a private matter of prayer, hang it in a private place.)

2. Cut flowers from colorful paper. Tulip shapes with writing space work well.

3. When, for example, Nana has a prayer concern, help your child to write Nana’s name, the date and details of her concern on a paper flower.

4. Using masking tape, stick Nana’s prayer flower to the paper, near the floor. Draw a stem for the flower.

5. With your child, pray for Nana. Check regularly on her condition.

6. As Nana’s condition improves, i.e. an emergency situation is reversed, health begins to return, she is released from hospital, comes home, can have visitors, goes back to church, shops at the store again, each time you receive such a report, thank God and move Nana’s prayer blossom farther up the wall and lengthen the stem. The flower seems to grow, and your child begins to see the connection between your prayers and Nana’s progress toward becoming well. The prayer flower’s moving up on the paper is a visual reminder to pray, a visual comfort, a gradual realization for your child that Nana is getting better.

So, at last, when Nana is well and comes for a visit, encourage your child to show her the PrayerGarden, the picture of her progress during your prayer times for her. It might well be that, on this day, your child will be the one to say, “Yea! Our prayers have been answered.”