"Thank You for Thanksgiving"

We're approaching the end of the first week of school, and I am loving my class this year. They are very interested in doing things properly, which means they actually pay attention to procedure instruction and then follow the instruction. From the very beginning. It's mind-boggling.

This desire to do things properly means that they try very hard, even when they don't really understand what's going on. This was evident from the very start when we began our day with prayer time.

This year, I have decided that I am going to try to break the students of the habit of praying to God as though he were a "big Santa Claus in the sky." The common practice in classroom prayer is some form of taking prayer requests and then allowing students who want to pray to do so. The prayers tend to follow the same format every time:

"Dear God, ThankyouforthisdayPleasehelpmepassmytest, um [sneak peek at prayer request list] I want to pray for John's baseball game, and, um [another peek] please make Susan's mom's sister's friend's dog feel better. Amen"

So this year, I began our prayer time with a discussion about developing a relationship with God and how prayer is a conversation with Him. To help them make the transition from prayer being a laundry list of requests to a conversation with God, I introduced them to "ACTS" for prayer. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. I knew I would have to explain the definitions of "Adoration," "Confession", and "Supplication," but I just briefly touched upon "Thanksgiving." I figured "giving thanks" was a pretty easy concept to understand.

So it was really funny when two of my students prayed along these lines:

". . . and, God, thank you for Thanksgiving, even though it's really far away, but we like it . . ."

It cracks me up that they had no idea why I wanted them to thank God for Thanksgiving in September, but that was what the procedure was, so that was what they were going to do.