I asked Pancake to pray

My daughter, the 8 year old Pancake, has been affected lately. The emotional impact of church is affecting her. She feels the spirit when she sings. One day she says, "I feel God in my heart when I sing.", she says. That was an awesome day.

When we drive home from church, when she is all fresh and a bit tender, I ask her about it. During those drives she is a ball of emotion. She'll cry easily, be joyful or befuddled. Sometimes she just get real quiet.

Such was the case last Sunday. I could sense something was wrong. Come to find out, it's something that's been wrong for a while. Pancake has a fear of the boogie man. "When I lay down I hear breathing and it's not me but you and Daddie don't believe me. Then I hear him talking and I think he's going to get me."

And it's true, she has this fear of the boogie man. We've tried comforting her in several different ways. We look under her bed, open her closet, pull back her curtains and show her nothing is there. We point out that we are literally 20 feet away in the next room. We put a sound machine in her room. Eventually, we just told her to suck it up. That was about 3 months ago. Apparently she just stopped telling us about her fears.

After her breakdown in the car, she bucked up a little. Later that night, I went to her room to prep her for bed. She told me she was scared and we ran through the routine of opening closets again. She was still scared. And crying. And afraid.

So I told her what I do when I'm really scared. "Sweetcheeks, I pray to help me not be scared." And I asked if I could pray for her and she said yes. So I prayed. It didn't help though, tears were still wet on her little cheeks.

I was exasperated. I looked her right in the eye and said, "Well, you pray then. You pray for God to help you and he will." She blinked a few times, nodded and snuggled with her blanket. "I'll try", she said.

With that I gave her a hug and flipped off the light.

And the next morning, while eating her oatmeal she said, "Mommy, it helped praying to Jesus. I wasn't so scared anymore." Then we high fived. That's right, high fived at the awesomeness of it all!!

And THAT'S all I got to say about that!