It’s easy for all of us—and especially children—to get in a rut of just thanking God for friends and asking Him to “be with them.” What else should we say? How can we learn to pray more specifically?

The Five Blessings Prayer is a helpful tool for expanding the way we pray for others. This method categorizes five main areas of a person’s life:

• Body – physical body, health, safety, and well-being
• Labor – work or school needs
• Emotional – peace, joy, happiness, etc.
• Social – friendships and family relationships
• Spiritual – relationship and walk with Christ.

To help our kids deepen their prayer lives, we created a 5-5-5 Challenge for our Keepers at Home group (a godly girlhood class for homeschooled children, ages 6–12 ). They pray these five blessings over five people for five weeks in a row. To help them remember the challenge, they decorated easy-to-make prayer cards.

Make Your Own

On 8 ½” x 11″ cardstock, we printed by hand the letters B-L-E-S-S and some simple icons on the front:

• for Body—the  outline of a person
• for Labor—a “busy” bee
• for Emotional—a  heart
• for Social—three  peas in a pod, smiling
• for Spiritual—a cross.

The kids used colored pencils, crayons, and markers to personalize the cards. On the back, we printed related Scriptures and prayer prompts for each area.

Folded in half, these cards make great tent cards. The kids can display them on their dressers, on a counter, or at their places at their kitchen table to remind them to pray. A quick look at the icons can prompt a prayer. With a little more time and a Bible, the kids can look up the related Scripture verses to guide their prayer time.

Our goal is to help the kids develop a habit of prayer for others that goes deeper than a basic thank-you or God-bless-the-missionaries prayer.

Learn More

You can learn more about using The Five Blessings method of praying for your neighbors and missionaries in The Praying Family: Creative Ways to Pray Together by Kim Butts. This book is a wonderful resource with many easy-to-implement ideas that will help you develop your family prayer life. (Available at prayershop.org.)

Jennifer Mayhill has been a coleader of the Kokomo, IN, chapter of Keepers at Home for three years.