Prayer Stories for Kids

One night as I was putting my children to bed, I like to tell them stories as I'm putting them to bed, and I was telling them this night the story of the widow's oil. The story basically goes like this: there's this famine going out throughout the land and everyone's starving to death. There's not enough food, there's not enough water, there's not enough of anything for anyone. And the prophet is walking through town one day, and as the prophet is walking through town, he sees a lady, and she says to him, "Please, can you help us? Can you help us?" And he says, "What can I do for you?" And she says, "We have no food. I have my two sons and we have no food. And the famine is, you know, everyone who has a little bit of money can buy food, but we have nothing." He says, "Well, what do you have?" So I'm telling this story to my kids and they're listening, they're sitting on the edge of their beds. "What do you have?" the prophet says. And she said, Nothing. We have nothing. And he says, well, go to your cupboard and look and tell me what you have. You must have a little of something. And so she goes in and she looks in the cupboard and she looks in the flour and there's no flour. And she looks in the sugar, there's no sugar. She looks for eggs and there's no eggs. And she realizes she's got nothing. Then she sees the oil jar. And she goes over to the oil jar and she lifts it up. No, empty. Then she looks inside and she can see a sheen at the bottom of the oil jar. She tips it and she sees it move. Well, there's just a little bit, maybe 5 or 6 drops of oil in the bottom, and she thinks, I can't tell the prophet I have nothing because there is that little bit of oil, so I'll take the oil to the prophet. So she comes back out of her house and she says, this is all I have, and she shows him. And he says, perfect, that'll do, that'll be fantastic. What you need to do is get all the jars that you can get, anything that you've got What have you got that's empty? And she said, well, I've got everything empty. He said, well, bring it all and put it in your lounge room. And so she brings all these jars and she starts setting them out. And she gets 2 or 3 rows of jars, empty jars that used to have flour and wheat and all different kinds of things in them. And he says, are you sure that's all the jars you have? She said, well, yeah. He said, well, then go to the neighbors and ask. So she sends her boys out and they go from neighbor to neighbor and they're bringing jars back. And they're lining the jars up in the lounge room. And pretty soon the lounge room's full. And the prophet says, what about the bedrooms? You could put some jars on the floor in the bedrooms. And so they start putting them in there, and they keep going, and finally the boys come back and say, "Mom, there's no more jars. All the neighbors have given us all their jars. That's all we can get." And now she's wondering what the prophet's going to do. What can he do with all these empty jars? And the prophet says, "Okay, now pour the oil into the jars." She looks at it and she says, "There's not enough oil in here to even start pouring into a jar. You won't even get that much." He said, "Just do it." Just believe, have faith, go pour the oil into the jars. And so she makes her way into the house and she kneels down next to the first pot and she starts to pour. Takes a long time because oil is fairly thick and it works its way forward towards the lip of the little oil jar that she has. And finally it gets right to the lip and a little bead of oil forms and it gets a bit thicker, thicker, thicker until it drops. Boop. And then another one. And pretty soon there's a tiny little stream forming, and she says, "Well, this is the end of it." Then the stream gets thicker and thicker, and she looks in as the oil's just pouring out at a steady pace. Pretty soon the other jar is filling up, filling up, filling up. So she moves quickly to the next jar, and it's filling up, filling up, and she just keeps moving. And she goes to the next jar and the next jar, and she makes her way around the entire lounge room and down the hallway and into the bedrooms, and she's filling up all these jars, and they're just getting more and more full. And the oil, she doesn't know how, but she's not going to stop pouring. And so she just keeps going until finally she's filled, she's up to the last jar, and she's yelling to the boys, "Boys, boys, more jars! We need more! There's more oil!" "Mom, there are no more jars. That's all we have." "But, but, but there's more oil!" "I'm sorry, Mom, there's no more jars." And so she stops, and she sits the oil thing up, and she looks inside, and it's dry. But she has a house full of oil. And the prophet smiles to her and he says, "You know what you can do now? Sell the oil. Many of your neighbors will need oil, and you can use that money to feed your family until the end of the famine." So after I finished telling the story, I tucked the boys into bed, and I took Rachel, my youngest child, into her room, and I tucked her into bed. And as I was tucking her in, Rachel looked up to me, and I had asked them at the end, "What do you think that story means, kids?" And they said, "That God will always help us?" And I said, "That's right. What about when we feel like there's nothing we can do and we've run out of something? What could we do to ask God to help?" They said, "We could pray." I said, "Yes, and what will God do if we pray?" "Answer our prayer?" "Yeah, just like he answered that lady when she asked the prophet for help." So I'm tucking Rachel into bed and Rachel says, "Dad, Jesus never gives me what I ask for when I pray." She said— I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, He's never given me anything I've asked for." And I said, "Well, what have you asked Jesus for that He hasn't given to you?" And she said, "Oh, um, nothing." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Oh, I don't know. I just can't remember Him ever answering one of my prayers." I said, "Well, what do you want, Rachel? What would you like that we could talk to Jesus right now and we could ask Him for? What would you like right now to pray about?" Nothing. Nothing? Um, yeah, no, nothing. Said, okay, I had an idea. Okay, close your eyes. She said, why? Because we're going to pray. Well, why? Because we're going to ask Jesus for what you just want, what you wanted. But, but just close your eyes, Rachel. Fold your hands. Okay. Dear Jesus, Rachel really, really, really wants nothing. Can you please give her lots and lots of nothing? Amen. Rachel, open your eyes. And she opened her eyes and said, "Look around! Look at it all!" And she said, "Dad, you're so silly." And I said, "But you asked for nothing, and nothing's changed. It's exactly what you asked for." And she said, "Dad." And I said, "Well, Rachel, you know that if you do ask Jesus, if you sometime actually do need something and you ask Jesus, He will help you. He will answer your prayer." She said, "Yeah, I know, Dad." And so put her to bed. A few weeks later, Rachel and I were on a long drive. We had gone to a camp meeting and we'd been working there, and Rachel was my buddy for the trip on that camp. And as we were driving home, she wanted to go to Mount Gambier, which is a little town in South Australia, right on the bottom of Australia. And in this town there's a beautiful blue lake, and that's what we'd gone to see. But somebody at the camp meeting told us, don't miss the sinkhole. If you go to the sinkhole and you go down there at night, you could feed possums and they'll come right up and take fruit right out of your hands. And so we did that. We went to the sinkhole and we waited and waited and waited. And finally it got dark enough, the possums came out. We fed the possums. We went back to the caravan park and we put ourselves into our little unit there and we got all set up and Rachel was in bed. And then I started doing what parents do at the end of the day. I unloaded my pockets, got my keys, my change, my everything. My wallet was gone. I emptied the car out. I went out and I got everything out of the car. My car had never been so clean. Wallet wasn't in the car. Wasn't in the cabin. Wasn't in the car. It must be in the sinkhole. Because I knew I'd had it that night. We'd bought food with it. And so it had to be, had to be in the sinkhole. So I got Rachel up and we went back and we went down, drove all the way to the sinkhole. And when we were just about there, I thought, This would be a great opportunity for Rachel to learn about prayer, because she was not too sure with God if He would answer her. So I said, "Rachel, you know what? We could ask God to help us right now, to help us find the wallet." And she said this, she said, "Dad, you can go ahead and pray about it if you want. I've already prayed about it twice, but if you want to, you could pray again." And I said, "Okay, well let's pray." So we prayed, and then we went down the long stairs, the sinkhole is really deep, down into the sinkhole, and we looked underneath the bench we'd been sitting on, and there it was. There was my wallet just sitting there, perfect. And so I picked it up, put it in my pocket, we went back up and got in the car, and as we were driving back to the caravan unit, I said, "Rachel, we should thank Jesus for helping us find the wallet." She said, "Okay, Dad." And so we closed our eyes and we said a little prayer and thanked Jesus for what he'd done. Hey, why don't we close our eyes together right now and have a little prayer together? Dear Jesus, we thank you that you are always with us. And that you are always willing to hear our prayer. And if we just would give it a go, if we would just open our mouth and pray to you and let our heart be spoken, say, "Dear Jesus, please help me with this," that just like the stories that we've learned from today, you will come through. You will hear our prayer and you will answer us. Thank you, Jesus. Amen.