Ha! Be prayerful during prayer with me? No.
Being prayerful during prayer? Yes. And I mean that, actually!
I know you're probably laughing at me, thinking this is a joke. But I'm serious!
I kind of got convicted of this idea from a blog post from Peanut Butter & Grace called "30 Seconds of Silence." It just got me thinking about how well I model prayer and recollection to my children. I have written a post in a past somewhat related to this called "Praying to Purposely be Seen." It was in reference to our need to model a personal prayer life to our children so that they see we're not only praying with them, but that we pray to the Lord also by ourselves, in hopes as they grow this will become something they imitate and make their own so that they too will have their own independent prayer life.
Yet what often happens when we pray with our children? I'm not sure about you, but for me, my eyes are flitting from child to child, I'm breaking up little scuffles because Teresa's foot is touching John-Paul's, I'm getting up to stop the toddler from grabbing the candle, I'm watching Joseph to make sure he is praying with us, etc... So in reality, anything but praying apparently. A few weeks ago, I decided to set a better example even with them all around me.
How? Well, call it pathetic but I guess I'm just finally coming to terms with the fact that....they're little kids. *Gasp!* Now, I normally would let age-appropriate things happen anyway all while having that balance of challenging my older two (almost 4 and 5-and-a-half) to pray in the best way they could. Typically, if Joseph (my oldest) gets distracted, it's really now (mostly) only because the others around him are doing stuff to distract him. It's ok, just time to call his attention back to our prayer. John-Paul is just overall antsy when we pray or his little imagination goes (he's a little boy, what can I expect??). Teresa and Ronan...well....toddler and baby, enough said! They're free to babble and wander. Occasionally Teresa gets the "shhhh" from either me...or Joseph (who sometimes thinks he's a parent) if she's getting too disruptive to even hear or if she's antagonizing her brothers (which she's very good at for a barely-two-year-old girl).
But all-in-all, I've decided to focus less on saying "Guys you need to try to be still as we pray" or "Let me hear you guys pray" or "Remember to look at the picure of Jesus or the crucifix or think of Jesus in your hearts" (again, all these things as best as they could be done but yet setting those standards for them as they grow and mature). If John-Paul's in imagination mode, I'll call him back to our prayer once or twice, but not as often as I did before. I'll still encourage them to pray with me, but if John-Paul isn't, that's fine. If Joseph trails off and is silent for a part of the prayer, and I don't say anything to remind him to pray with us, I'm finding he'll join in again - it's just his age. I'm seeing though that they do have a budding reverence for prayer, which, phew! is good. (I hope I'm making myself clear as I'm explaining this!)
I've decided to instead focus on being recollected and more prayerful as I pray so that they will actually see how we're supposed to pray. Because let's face it, even if I tell them ten times, "Let's try to be still as we pray," it's not that they don't know that, it's because they forget and because they're little children. Yet at the same time, it's that prudent balance of challenging them in age-appropriate ways. So I'd say now when we pray, it's generally 30% correction and training and 70% just trying to be more of a prayerful model myself. There's ways to bring them back to prayer without saying a word or disrupting anything at all; I wrote about this in my blog 10 Ways to Gentle Encourage Young Children to Pray. But I think just as important is modeling prayerfulness ourselves - the best we can while being surrounded by little children! - by closing our eyes and keeping our heads bowed for a few seconds at a time, reverently bowing our head at the name of Jesus, gazing upon the crucifix or a sacred picture that's fixed at the family altar for a brief period of time, putting our hand on our heart, etc... I know it might be hard as children rustle about around you, but you get used to it and it becomes easier to recollect yourself interiorly - even if just for a few seconds at a time.
This, also, is by no means an excuse to neglect things that need tended to during our prayer time (like having to separate siblings who are bothering each other over something silly, or correcting someone who is saying prayers in a silly way, and so on), but this shift is something that's made a difference in our prayer time and I'm confident - by God's grace - that they'll adapt this to themselves as they mature and grow out of their little kid phases. It's only a matter of time, prayer, and patience on our part!
So pray on prayer warrior!