One of the things I occasionally get asked about is prayer. People are concerned that they don’t really know how to do it. That they might do it ‘wrong’ or that they have to have really articulate and well-thought-out prayers.

But Scripture says:

If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.

Romans 8:26 MSG

I find that so encouraging, because sometimes I don’t know what to pray. Sometimes I don’t have the words, or the presence of mind to put words together. Sometimes in prayer, I just imagine opening my heart to God – I imagine me lifting a valentine’s-day-shaped heart to God, so that God knows what’s in there that I can’t quite put into words. And then I trust that the Holy Spirit makes sense out of that on my behalf.

For me it takes the pressure off having to figure out how to put things into words that I’m still working on processing.

You may feel that way these days – there is so much information that is changing hour by hour, we are living in unprecedented times, how do we even know what to pray at times like this?

So I wanted to share the above scripture, but I also wanted to share with you this resource. These are prayer-colouring pages provided free-of-charge from illustratedministry.com – the same folks that provided the banner that (at Graceview) we coloured each week of Advent this year.

These pages were made with the intention of helping kids who might be having a hard time in these scary days. But since the adult colouring is still a thing, I see no reason for the rest of us to use them as well. Print them off, colour them, and trust that the Holy Spirit is interpreting even the strokes of your marker or colouring pencil as prayer to God! (And post them on your fridge or elsewhere once you are done, as a colourful reminder of God’s faithfulness even in these trying times.