Children
and young
people can be
powerful prayers!
Look for ways to
include them in your
plans for Feb 3rd.

No matter what your age, you're never too young to pray!

Don't let the adults have all the fun on February 3rd! Whatever age you are, you can join in praying for Salvation for our Nation.

What is important to you? Your school? Your friends? The environment? Bullying? Crime? Your family?

Whatever it is, prayer works!

The Bible tells us that you can give all your worries and cares to God because he cares about what happens to you (1 Peter 5:7).

Of course, we can pray every day, but on February 3rd 2010, let's set aside a special day to tell God all about the concerns we have for our nation.

Below are some great fasting and prayer ideas to get you started.

Ideas for Praying:

Alphabet prayer - pray for something beginning with each letter of the alphabet. If you can do this you will have prayed 26 prayers!

Journeying prayer - look around you as you travel to school and pray for situations in your own community.

Set your mobile phone alarm to go off at strategic times as a reminder to pray. If you have a calendar or appointment system on your phone, you could programme it to remind you to pray for different things at different times of day.

Watch the news for a few minutes before you go to school - pray through the day for the events and situations you saw reported.

Meditate - use a favourite verse from the Bible for meditating. Read it aloud very slowly, and stop to pray whenever a word or phrase strikes you.

Prayer beads - take five different coloured beads and make each one stand for a particular prayer, e.g. blue could stand for praying for your friends, red could be praying for the government etc. Keep them in your pocket all day, and whenever you remember, take one out and say a prayer for whatever that bead stands for.

Pray with your family - spend some time at breakfast praying together. If you're not used to it, it will be weird at first, but keep going - it gets better!

Headline prayers - in the days and weeks before Feb 3rd, cut out headlines from the newspaper and keep them safe. Then pray through each story on Feb 8th.

Ideas for Fasting:

Fasting is when we give something up for a while and use the extra time to focus on God and pray. Jesus fasted when he went out into the wilderness, and there are plenty of times when God's people were told to fast for a particular reason.

Usually, fasting means giving up food. Check with your parents before you decide to give up eating for the day as childen and young people need their energy!

If you can't fast from food for a day, try these other great ideas:

Fast from a particular kind of food - lay off the chocolate, crisps or fizzy drinks.

Fast from TV, the internet, computer games etc. This should give you plenty of extra time.

Fast from company - instead of constantly being with other people, spend a little time alone with God.

Fast from the car/bus - instead of travelling on four wheels, try travelling on two feet for the day, praying as you walk.