Pray-er in God's Presence and Fluctuations

Can God's rainbow connect my heart's temple to my kids'?

If God is never changing, which I really, truly do believe, what's going on with the fluctuation of our prayer lives and, by proxy, the prayer lives with our kids? Prayer can be such a burden with them sometimes, right?

When we experience the harder moments of prayer because we are tired or our kids are tired what is going on with the movements of the heart?

I am sure you have heard the terms "consolation" and "desolation," but do we really even understand these meanings in our day to day life? At first glance, it can seem "consolation" means an easier experience of praying when the peace of God overwhelms us without trying, while "desolation" would be the opposite. Desolation is when prayer is hard for some reason, which entices us to diagnose the reason and find the treatment plan, er, prayer.

Do you see the problem? Desolation seems interconnected with my circumstance. Change the circumstance, change the experience, right? We hear our hearts saying "...but God... has not changed the relationship between myself and this other person. I am still feeling terrible..." or "will not fix the health crisis of my family member..." Perhaps there IS another way to view desolation.

If I think about prayer as art, myself and my kids as artists, then, the terms "consolation and desolation" become words that have way more depth. Deep calls to deep, after all.

Was Mary in consolation when she was looking for Jesus and found Him three days later in the Temple or when she was at the Cross? Yet, she was doing her duty in both instances and seeking Him for His own sake. As a prayer artist, she was moving towards God even in the depth of discomfort. She was human and questioned, also, "why did you do this to us?" She was not feeling peace while looking for Him, but she was in "consolation" when the definition is moving towards Him or, at least, trying to move toward Him when she did not know where He was. Can I mimic the example of moving towards God, when I can't find Him, and feel confused...in prayer on behalf of my kids?

Therefore, when we think of prayer with our kids, we can model a deeper meaning of "consolation." We can model the meaning of consolation moving towards the consoling of God, looking for Him and finding Him in the Temple of our heart or even at the foot of His Cross as we carry ours with Him. Our kids see this example, and they see us wrestle in real ways with circumstance. They can see us laugh at something when it was a hard day, then, turn and realize all joy comes from Jesus if we point it out in our way of living.

They also see our desolation, which is okay. They see our responses of movement away from Him... when we pick up our phone for a distraction because something of our inner life wants the distraction from the Eternal Now, because the weight of glory in this present circumstance is just too much. Then, they see us return to movement towards Him, and all without saying what we are doing. These moments are caught not taught. Not every moment is one of moving away from God's Eternal Now, and not every moment is moving towards. Sometimes we are just sitting with Him, as Mary did in Nazareth. Our kids, little prayer artists, see this part as well.

Sometimes, it takes these little Sacramentals, these anointed kids of ours as biofeedback to point us back to a habit which helps us fall back into consolation, back to moving towards God; they help us continue to move towards the consoling of God, building something that has never happened before... a unique path to Jesus' Tree of Life.