Do you ever feel unsure how to lead your kids in prayer without it feeling forced or awkward? 

Welcome to The Collide Podcast Summer Highlight Series!

All summer long, we’re bringing back some of our most impactful episodes — powerful conversations centered around life-changing collisions with Jesus. Whether this is your first time hearing the episode or you’re revisiting an old favorite, each story is filled with hope, healing, and purpose.

This episode originally aired in September 2024 and quickly became a favorite among parents, grandparents, and ministry leaders. In this episode, author and speaker Erica Renaud shares a grace-filled, practical approach to inviting children into meaningful conversations with God—without pressure, performance, or guilt.

About This Episode

Erica draws from her book Pray with Me to explore how adults can help children engage in authentic, powerful prayer. We talk about how parents’ own hang-ups with prayer can impact their kids, and how to move toward a more relational, creative, and joy-filled way of praying together. Whether you’re raising kids or leading them in ministry, this episode offers encouragement and simple, transformative practices to help children know God as a loving Father—not just a gift-giver.

Meet Erica Renaud

Erica Renaud is a passionate speaker, writer, and the author of Pray with Me: Help Your Children Engage in Authentic and Powerful Prayer. She is the founder of two prayer initiatives and serves as a leader in her local church. A mom of five and an art teacher, Erica brings warmth, creativity, and deep faith to everything she does. She’s committed to helping families cultivate a meaningful relationship with God through prayer.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

• How to invite children into prayer without pressure or obligation
• Why your own relationship with prayer shapes how your kids experience God
• Creative ways to help kids talk to God with honesty and trust
• How to shift their (and your) perspective of God from gift-giver to loving Father
• Encouragement for parents who feel unsure about leading their kids spiritually

How This Episode Will Encourage You

You’ll leave this episode feeling empowered and inspired to make prayer a natural, joyful part of family life. Erica’s insight will remind you that perfection isn’t required—just a willingness to show up, ask good questions, and invite God into everyday moments.

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Connect with Erica on her Website or Instagram.

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Hey there. Welcome to the Collide podcast. This is Willow Weston, and I am coming at you from the recording studio at the Collide office.

And I just got to sit down with Erica Renaud in New York, who her and I just had a fabulous conversation. What a deep soul. Love talking to her. She wrote a book called Pray with me Help your children engage in authentic and powerful prayer.

And we gotta have a conversation that I think will bless all you mamas out there on just authentic, non manipulative, non oppressive or forceful ways to invite your kids to talk to God. And I loved all of her ideas. I loved her wisdom around it.

And so I hope you will listen to this and it will not only grow your kids faith, but it'll grow your faith as well. Check it out.

Erica, I love that you're joining me from New York. We couldn't be more, I mean, farther away in our country than where we are.

I'm joining you from Washington States. So isn't this great?

My mom is in Washington right now visiting, you know, just all those, like, amazing parks that you guys have in the northwest side of the country. And every morning she sends a different photo and I'm like, we get it. It's beautiful. Okay.

Well, we do the same thing when we visit New York, or at least friends do. I haven't visited yet, but it sounds amazing. So love that we get to have this conversation even though we're so far apart.

You recently wrote a book called Pray with me, Help your children engage in authentic and powerful prayer. And I'm just curious if you can give us a bit of background on why you're so passionate about that topic.

I mean, you could have written a book on a million other things, but that's what you wrote a book about. So tell us about it.

Yeah, I think that I had a unique experience with prayer as a young adult and that we really quickly joined. Shortly after we got married, we joined this community of just dedicated praying people.

That sounds so silly, but it was shortly after my life had really like, I had got serious about God. And so we began praying every Saturday night, just for hours. There was worship involved.

And it was kind of like come to the prayer meeting, but like, nobody really came. So it was like the same group of like 10 people all the time, worshiping, praying, cold, hot, you know, whatever it was.

The building was just sort of like a cement, you know, cement walls. It wasn't comfortable.

There's nothing special about that time, but I really felt like I engaged with God in a way that I just never had before a way that I just kept feeling like, he is so real. He is so real. Like, it's just like that. That just overflowed in me, just feeling like, wow, we can engage with God.

We can be close to God, you know, in just these ways that I hadn't experienced before.

And so in those prayer meetings, we had a nursery in the back of the room that was, you know, it was like, you keep the kids separate from, like, the adult activity, right? And so one of the weeks, there was nobody there to do nursery, and I was back there as the single, you know, just as a.

We normally had two adults back there to do nursery. And I was like, you know, let's just bring the kids into this prayer meeting. Why are we. Why do we keep separating them?

So we bring them in, and I just pulled out, like, some art supplies and some flags and just start kind of engaging the kids in prayer with what was going on about that time. I had a daughter of my own. And so we took what happened on those Saturday nights, and we just started doing it in our living room, in our bedroom.

We just started praying together in these. In various creative ways. And I felt like, wow, kids can engage God. It's a matter of us kind of engaging them and coming alongside them.

But my mind was kind of just blown away as I was seeing children fall in love with God and fall in love with prayer. So, yeah, I have five kids of my own, so prayer, children, it's all pretty close to my heart.

I love that so much. I have two kids. They're young adults, and I definitely learned pretty quickly.

Uh, and I always talk about how my kids schooled me, but truly, I feel like I learned more about God parenting my kids than in any other season of my life. Just learning the love of a father and how the. A parent, a father would feel about his kids, and so many things.

But we talk a lot around here at Collide about colliding with Jesus, running into Jesus. And when you run into Jesus in the New Testament, there's this story, right, where kids are almost a nuisance to Jesus's disciples.

And they're kind of like, you know, shoo, shoo, shoo. And Jesus actually says, let the little children come to me.

And I always read that and deeply understood that when I went to my kids, it was almost like I got closer to God because he's so near to children, and their faith is so small, simple. So I'm curious for you. Like, you're a mom of five kids, Holy Cow, like, how have you grown into a greater understanding of God by being a parent?

Yeah, that's an excellent question. I think every day when I have to face all of my. Like, oh, I wish I did that better.

All of our insecurities, all of our failings, all of our falling short, uh, I think parenting just. It's like, it brings you to your knees. It's like a humility. A giant dose of humility. Um, like, I. For me, personally, I think just that.

That prayer that's daily, like, oh, my gosh, I need you. Like, I messed up again, or I need to grow in this area. So there's that. And then just when we gather together.

So we've gone through a lot of transition just in these past few months as a family, and it has just naturally lent itself to praying because there's so many conversations that we have that are like, yeah, we don't know. We're just sort of trusting God, and the most natural thing to do is to pray together. Well, sometimes I forget that.

And my kids have reminded me, well, we should probably pray about that, or maybe we should pray about that at dinner time.

So sometimes my adult mind is stressed about adult things, and the kids remember the bigger picture, which is so opposite, I feel like, of what we think because we're constantly, like, you don't understand. Like, you know, this is a big deal. Right? And then.

But the opposite is also true, that sometimes we get caught up in these nitty gritty, and we need our children to remind us we should probably be praying about this, or can we pause and pray about this right now? So, yeah. Yeah.

Erica, I think there's a lot of women listening who. At least women I run into around here who maybe feel intimidated around. How do I invite my kids to know Jesus? How do I pass on my faith?

How do I encourage them to pray? And so I'm curious what your advice is to women who are feeling that way.

Yeah, yeah. My. I mean, my first piece of advice is like, yeah, no kidding. Like, we all feel intimidated.

Like, if we're, like, in positioning, our place is like, let me tell you about God. Let me show you about God. That's just intimidating, probably, if you're not intimidated by that, you know, maybe.

Maybe we need to, like, revisit that. He is so big and grand and holy. Like, we just don't want to misrepresent him. And I don't know, like, probably most moms are like me.

It feels like every other day you're hearing somebody say, like, well, you know, I grew up with this sort of skewed understanding of God because my parents da da da da. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, the amount of pressure, like, on moms everywhere is just so tremendous. So.

So I would say the first thing is, like, if you're feeling intimidated, that's fine. Like, we're all, you know, we all feel a little bit of that, like, trepidation around teaching our kids about God and helping them engage with Go.

But the second thing I'd say is probably reject the idea that there is a right way to pray, that there is a specific formula, or that it should look a certain way, because I don't believe that that's true. I would say if women are wanting to start someplace, I give this as a piece of advice, just as a starting point. But this isn't like the ideal.

I think a good place to start.

Start would just be to try to make it a priority to pray every day, just even once a day, whether that's on the way to school, whether that's around the dinner table, and just embrace that as like, okay, this is when we pray. Start making prayer a habit. Once prayer kind of becomes that habit, it becomes a lot easier to, you know, move around within that time that you pray.

So if praying before bed, you know, becomes a habit, then, you know, then there's not this, like, oh, like, do we have to pray? Or, you know, sometimes that. That happens with older children. You know, it's just like this already. It's this established thing.

And then you can sort of play around with it. You could say, hey, like, let's put some music on. Let's pray in our heads for the duration of this song.

Or let's draw some stick figures in your journal and just. We'll write the names of your friends above those stick figures and. And you can put your fin.

Each of those stick figures as we pray for your friends, you know, so I just, like, real simple, like, think super, super simple. But for sure, like, don't let the.

Those insecurities or feeling like prayer is supposed to look like something creep in, because that's going to sort of kill. Kill the heart really, of prayer is if we're thinking it needs to be this certain way.

I love some of the ideas you just, you know, spouted out there.

And I'm thinking, you know, for some people, prayer has become really sort of obligatory and maybe even for themselves, like, where prayer is, is a habit.

Like, we pray at dinner, we pray at bedtime, but a lot of people, moms haven't even thought about doing prayers that you just talked about for themselves, let alone for their kids. So I'm curious if you have good resour or maybe that's what's in your book.

But good ideas of like, hey, here's some different ideas on ways you can pray with your kids.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think so. My book is packed full of different ideas.

I just kind of like walk through different types of prayer, what prayer might look like, kind of break it down, you know, with different age groups. I think, you know, we started off talking about how kids help our faith.

This is a really cool area where as an adult, it's easy to kind of get in a rut with things. But when you invite kids into it, like, there's just so many different options.

There's things that I might do with my kids for, like, a time of prayer that I just probably wouldn't do by myself. One of the things we like doing is if we play music, I'll just have the kids doodle. They can't write any words. Just doodle.

And the cool thing with that is, like, that I learned kind of recently is you're. Well, this part I didn't learn recently. But when you're doing art, when you're doodling, you're engaging a different part of your mind.

And when we're writing words and we're thinking in context of words, we're just using that very linear. Those linear parts of our brain. Right.

But if we're just doodling and our heart is connecting with God, then we're engaging a different part of our brain, which is sort of sounds familiar for us Christians where we're told to love God with all of our mind. So I think, you know, I employ a lot more creativity when I'm trying to engage my kids in prayer than I do for my own personal life.

Totally.

I'm kind of curious how you keep prayer from becoming something that's forced or obligated or manipulated, because I know that's a story for a lot of adults where they felt like their parents sort of, you know, oppressed them to pray. How do you make it more of an invitation than an obligation?

That is a fabulous question. So I think I have a slightly, Slightly, I don't know, different perspective. My husband's in ministry, you know, employed ministry.

I'm obviously in ministry in various forms, and I feel incredibly sensitive about that exact topic. I feel, like, a tremendous amount of pressure to not make God a burden. And so I Often ask myself, is prayer a habit?

Because I think a habit is a good thing, or has prayer become a burden? And I'll be totally honest with you, there are potentially whole weeks that we don't pray together as a family. Or.

Or, you know, maybe I just pray with one or two kids before bed. And I wrote a book on prayer.

So I'm publicly saying, like, there is, like, a plethora of days that will go by, and I'll be like, oh, my gosh, somebody pray before dinner. And so. So I think the biggest question is, like, are you trying to make your kids pray so that you'll feel better?

Or are you literally, you know, if you imagine your hands out like you're handing somebody a gift, or are you offering this gift?

And so when we think about prayer as a gift we're offering our children, the tone, how we go about it, our instructions are just so different than if we feel like, you know, these are vegetables that you have to eat kind of a thing.

And so our attitude when we're offering this gift of prayer just really sets the tone versus if I felt pressure like I needed to pray with my kids or they weren't going to turn out good, or they're not going to be good Christians, or they're not, you know, da, da, da, then we're going to get into manipulation, Then we're going to get into being a burden, then we're going to get into trying to force this upon them. And so I think the beautiful thing is, like what you referenced earlier, Jesus said, let the children come to me.

And I think when we just sit on that, let the children come to me. There's this implied desire for children to want to go to Jesus. They want to know their heavenly Father.

I believe there's this, you know, kind of implied desire there.

We're just there to let them do it. We're there to, like, hold their hand and be like, hey, this is how we can get to Jesus. This is how we can spend time with Him.

This is how we can talk to Him. This is how we can just be in his presence. And all these things are beautiful.

And he loves anytime our heart is just engaging with him and focusing on him.

So good, Erica. So good.

I think about, you know, potentially there's an invitation there for us as parents that if we don't view it as a gift, we don't view prayer as a gift. How will our kids view it? So there's a. There's an element of this where we have to get right on how we view it too.

And if we have some baggage from our parents or our past, there might be an invitation to some healing so that we see it as a gift as well. Because in the end, we're kids too, Right? So I'm curious. I've seen some.

I mean, I'm sure you have too, but I've been in circles where I've seen parents almost get angry with kids about, you know, we're praying right now. You need to close your eyes. You need to, you know, kind of like all these expectations and pressures.

And I'm wondering from you, like, what are some ways we get it wrong? And then what are some ways we can get it right?

Sure.

So I think we can easily get it wrong if we're looking for certain outcomes, if we're looking for our kids to engage in this particular way, if we're looking for our kids behavior to start doing this, you know, as soon as we start looking for certain outcomes or very specific behaviors, I think it's really easy to get it wrong. And it kind of, you know, that wanting certain outcomes can tweak our motivation. Right.

And the way that we approach prayer, I think some ways that we can really get it right is just kind of in our head, making some light boundaries. So at dinner time, for instance, maybe this will help some people too.

Along the lines of your question, at dinner time, we instruct our kids to close their eyes, close their eyes, put their hands down. But several of my children have pushed back on that.

So that has naturally led to, okay, well, to be fair, you know, so that now the parent has to like, get internal a little bit. And so I had to analyze that. Why do I want them to close their eyes?

Why do I feel like closing their eyes is like the quote, unquote, right thing to do? And I realized, you know what, Closing our eyes just, in my opinion, helps us to focus on God. We're saying no to things so that we can focus on God.

And there's nothing wrong with. I think, I don't think there's anything wrong with telling your kids to close their eyes.

On the other hand, my kids have two in particular have told me, I don't feel like I can focus on God as well with my eyes closed. That's a distraction to me. My eyes are never closed during the day. I feel more comfortable with them open.

To which I had to say, okay, fair enough, that you can keep your eyes open when we pray. And so sort of like embracing their questions and kind of trying to get at the heart of, you know, why do I want you to close your eyes? So it can.

I feel like you could maybe apply that type of principle to. To any number of things. So.

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You know, why do I want you to close your eyes? So it can. I feel like you could maybe apply that type of principle to. To any number of things.

So, yeah, absolutely.

There are some funny things that we sort of bring from our own experiences into teaching our kids that I think it's good for us to ask, like, why are we demanding that our kid do this in prayer? Why are we expecting this or that? I'm curious.

There are so many ways that you can invite your kid into prayer, and a lot of it sort of communicates the character of God. There's a lot of people who go to God in prayer with their kids when they need something.

And then we sort of translate this idea our kid does to like, God is like Santa Claus. Like, I go to God when I need something. How do you invite kids into talking to God? And it's beyond just asking him for something they want.

Yeah, I love that question. So, yeah. So, I mean, first of all, when kids are asking God for things, you know, we. We do want to encourage them, like, hey, you know what?

God is the person to ask. But our prayers aren't like, you know, a wish list before God. Praying is, you know, just thinking about God talk.

It's like, you know, we're talking with him, like, he's right in front of us.

And I think a great place to start with sor of expanding their thoughts on prayer would just to be to do a time of guided prayer where you say, okay, so there's two different ways you could do this. Is one, you could say, hey, we're going to pray. I'll just use my family as an example. We're going to pray.

We're going to, you know, take a turn praying around the table. And how about everybody just thank God for something and so then there's no time of request at all. We've just all taken a chance.

We've all engaged with God. We've all taken that chance or opportunity to thank him for something. And asking for something doesn't even come up right.

And so then another way we could do that is when your, you know, child is asking for things, you might say something along the lines of like, hey, you know what? There are some people that, you know that don't know God and that don't pray. What are some things that we could pray for for them?

What do you think God wants to do in their life? And, you know, I would say name specific people who are your kid's friends. Start with them, and maybe you'll be a friend or maybe be a family member.

And I often think in terms of, like, concentric circles. Like our, you know, we're sort of at that center, center circle. Our needs are center. But then, like. But then we can pray for our family.

Then we can move out a little bit and pray for our friends. Then we can move out a little bit and pray for, you know, our neighborhood.

And it really just begins with those prompting questions like, what do you think God wants to do in our neighborhood? What do you think we could pray for? For, you know, I don't know, Joey and whoever on. On either side of us. And to.

To kind of get them thinking outside of themselves with just those simple little prompts.

Yeah, that's so good. And obviously, as a parent, your mind has to be on. On those things as well. You have to be thinking outside of, you know, God's my sug, which is good.

What do you do to help kids not feel like they have to impress God?

Well, that's a great question. What would I recommend? You know what? I've not. I'll be totally honest. I haven't really thought about that.

My kids are not the kind of kids who are trying to impress.

People.

The funny thing, I'm like, oh, guys, come on, let's button up your shirts a bit. That's a fabulous question, one that I've really not thought much about. I think that more than anything, we sort of set the tone.

If our tone is we can come to Jesus as we are, I think that's probably going to rub off on our kids.

If our tone is, well, we pray today and therefore, you know, such and such, or if we're bragging about how long we prayed or how often we prayed or how many chapters we read in our Bible, you know, if we're kind of bragging in both about those things. Yeah, that's gonna rub off on our kids and. And they're likely to get the wrong impression, so.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious, in your own personal story, did your parents pray with you?

Is this something that, you know, is something that was passed on to you and you're carrying it on, or was this a new thing for you that you became passionate about?

So I. My first experience with prayer was kneeling on a velvet bench in a very small town Catholic church and saying Hail Mary and Our Fathers and.

And that kind of thing. So I went to Catholic masses till I was about. In second grade.

And about that time, my mom sort of went through her own personal kind of transformation, and we started going to a more Protestant evangelical church. And it was very interesting, her experience with Catholicism versus the evangelical church.

Now I'm going to tell the story, but I also want to just preface by saying this isn't everybody's experience. And I don't know that the prayers in Catholicism were, you know, were this, like, awful thing. I don't mean that at all.

But for her, what she discovered in that next stage of life was that she could have a personal relationship with God that she didn't feel like she could have via Catholicism, via talking to a priest and saying these prescribed prayers. So for me as a child, I got to witness this, you know, very formulaic. This is what prayer is.

We kneel, we pray, we get up, you know, or I remember we had a rosary that we used to pray as well. And so I believe that I learned a reverence for God through that. But it was also very awesome to then experience.

Oh, we can, you know, pray when we feel like it. We can pray before bed. So as a child, I. I journaled a lot. And so as a kid, I don't recall praying so much as a family.

I recall, you know, my dad praying before dinner. I remember my mom praying at my bed, you know, with me before bed. But mostly I, you know, just would kind of journal.

Sometimes it was talking to God, sometimes it was just, you know, chronicling a funny story. But those are sort of my childhood experiences with prayer. So I had this desire to follow him as a young girl. As I got into high school, I just.

I struggled so bad to follow him. I feel like if there was this, you know, straight and narrow path in front of me, I was just running in the opposite direction.

And so what's really interesting, though, is like, years after those terrible high school years, years after I found my journals and even throughout those times that I was just obviously running away from God through my actions, I saw that in my prayer journals.

I was actually crying out to God, like, asking him to help me, asking him to change me, asking him to, you know, shape me and mold me, because I was just so out of control. So it's really.

It's really interesting to me that just that little getting started, journaling as, you know, a second grader, third grader, really exposed me to the person of God. And even when my life was running in the other direction, my heart was still pretty tethered to him through journaling and through prayer.

Really interesting, Erica. Interesting. It sounds like you've been a deep soul for a long time. I love that so much.

I also think something that's interesting and I grew up in an irreligious home, and, like, you hit up a Catholic church. I think once at a slumber party on Sunday, after the slumber party, and I did not know what. What was happening. I was very lost.

But I think what's interesting about prayer, as I hear you talk, you talked earlier about making it a habit. And I think there's this beautiful element. I sort of liken it to marriage.

I've been married 25 years, and there are rhythmic things that we've set up in our relationship that they're already put in place that create almost a habitual connection. And then they're, like, spontaneous, like, let's go on a date night. Let's connect. Kind of like these.

Not habits, but these special times of connection outside of that. And I think for a good relationship, you need both.

I mean, you certainly hit seasons of life in your faith where just like a marriage, things can feel really like, oh, I'm in the habit of, like, you know, we have dinner every night. We, you know, these things, although they're so important for connection, but we need. We need to have connection outside of that.

So I kind of think of prayer like that, like having a habit of praying at dinner, praying at night with our kids. Those things are all so good.

But there's also the moments, like you're talking about where you can have, you know, a moment in your car where you get a call and someone's having a hard day, and you invite your kid to pray with you for that person or whatever. That's not a habit, but it's kind of like you're busting out in spontaneous connection with the Lord.

And it feels like for teaching our kids how to pray, both feel so important.

Yeah, I completely agree.

I really love in Deuteronomy 6, when he, when, when Moses is kind of laying things out for the Israelites and he's like, you need to teach your kids how to love God. Talk to them while they're walking, while they're sitting, while they're laying down. And he sort of like lists out all these things.

And as I look at that list, I feel like, you know, some of those activities are like everyday kind of planned activities. Laying down. For instance, like every day your kids are gonna go to bed. Like, that's a great time to make prayer, that, that habit, right?

Or dinner time. It's a great time to, to work on that habitual prayer. But then some of those other activities are just spontaneous.

And so, you know, if we, if we kind of have that on our radar, if we're, we can be sort of like opportunistic, you know, I guess, like if, if something arises we can say, hey, this is a great opportunity to pray about that. An ambulance just went by. Why don't we pray for them? Or, you know, a kid is having trouble, hey, let's pray for that. So I completely agree.

I think that both kind of hitting it from both angles helps create this sort of well rounded understanding of prayer and what prayer is. You know, we make it a habit because it's a priority. We make space for it in our life. It's important, it's a priority.

But then it's also spontaneous because every, every moment we, you know, we could be leaning on God for something else or seeking him for something or behalf of someone at any moment.

Absolutely. I'm curious if you've had a moment of prayer with one of your kids that you just will never forget.

Probably, yeah. I mean, multiple. I can. So, okay, so I have one child who's very private and not, not too keen on praying together, one on one.

I think she's just a kind of a personal sort of a gal. And she at the time was probably ninth grade and going through a little bit of a phase, sort of like a I don't need my mom anymore phase.

And she came in to chat with me about some things that were going on that were just really upsetting her. And I'm taking in what she said. I'm thinking, my gosh, I have no advice for this.

Like, I think, I don't even, I don't know where my head was at, but I wasn't. And it just like needed a moment, like, to think about what she was telling me. And so literally, sort of just to buy Myself some time.

I was like, well, you know, first of all, you should probably pray about that. And she goes, oh, believe me, I have. And I was just blown away that here's my very private daughter who, you know, really.

If I was like, hey, you know, do you want to pray together? She's like, nope, that's okay. And yet here was this thing that she had already prayed about. And so I was.

It was very easy for me to then say, great, well, you know, do you want to pray again about it now? And what's so cool is that though her heart was kind of hard towards me in that season, that hardness didn't translate to God.

And that is like, that was one of the most beautiful things. Because for any listeners that have older kids, even younger kids can do this.

Just because their heart is hard towards us doesn't always mean that they are rejecting God. Just because they say they don't want to pray with us doesn't mean that they're actually, you know, not praying at all or think poorly of God.

Now, sometimes. Sometimes that does spill over into their relationship with God, which is very unfortunate, but in this case, it hadn't.

And I remember being able to pray with her and just feeling so glad that this need that she had, she knew she needed God. She came to me, I think, you know, for advice. And I probably did give her some sort of advice when we were done praying.

But she knew who she really needed to go to, and she already went to him before me.

I love that.

I'm curious, because that got me thinking about the parent listening who is maybe just feeling so bummed and disappointed because they have a kid who's pushing God away in their life and offering to pray with them is sort of being rejected. What's your advice to them right now?

Yeah. So first of all, if that's the season that you're in, my heart goes out to you, because that is just a really tough place to be.

As Christian parents, I think it, you know, we just desire so much for our children to know and love Jesus. And so when that thing that's of primary importance to us seems to really not be there or falling apart, it is just heartbreaking.

So my first piece of advice would be to resist the urge to try to fix that and make that right. Because probably my guess would be, and I've been there, my guess would be you'd be doing that out of a place of pain. Pain.

And maybe out of a place of feeling like you have failed in some way. So my first thing would be to kind of reject that, like, take a pause.

And the second thing, I guess I would say is that you're to maybe try to, like, disassociate a little bit. So sometimes I think we can.

Not intentionally, but sometimes we can sort of position ourselves as the gatekeeper to God because we're the ones initiating. We're the ones always praying. We're the ones telling our kids to pray. And so we unintentionally position ourselves as that gatekeeper.

And so if there's a way to. And I would. You'd have to pray about this to.

To ask God, like, God, give me a creative way to do this, but some way to detach yourself as being the gatekeeper, to allow them that space to. To seek God on their own and to not be so forceful. Ultimately, they need to want God, they need to desire God.

And there's nothing that we can do externally that, you know, we don't have access to their heart. God has access to their heart. The Holy Spirit has access to their heart. We're.

We're on the outside influencing, but if we try to force their will and their desire, I don't think that that's gonna end well. And so the third thing I'd say is that we can just continue modeling our dependence on God and our love for God.

And I have heard countless women say that when their kids rejected them, when their kids rejected God, they just all the more were able to just keep their eyes on God and keep their focus on him. And their kids will come back and say, like, your faith is so amazing. In fact, I have a sister whose.

Her relationship with God is not 100%, and yet she always says to my mom, your faith is so impressive. Your love for God is just so impressive. And I feel like, what a testimony.

If we can keep our eyes on God, if we can continue to love our children really well despite whatever choices they're making, and we can keep our eyes on God. I think that's ultimately going to come back around as a testimony.

I mean, we don't want our kids to say, you know, you know, I rejected God and then my parents rejected me. Right. We want our kids to say, I rejected God. I know it hurt my parents, but they continue to love me so well through it.

So good. Erica, you're such a beautiful resource for moms. Honestly, like, I'm loving.

I mean, I've raised my kids, but I wish that I would have had you as a resource to turn to when they were little. So I'm So glad that moms do. And I know there's many listening who are going to want to follow you and get a copy of your book and all the things.

How can they do that?

Yeah, I would say the, the, the best way to get the resource would just be to buy the book because it's all, you know, I, I, anybody who writes a book, they're just taking their time with it. You're crafting words, you're working with the editor. It's all and good is here in the book. It's called Pray with me.

Help your children engage in authentic and powerful prayer. And the second way I'd say is these days, mostly I'm on Instagram.

So if you want like a lot of day to day kind of things and then inspirational posts or ideas to kind of brighten up your feed with ideas for how to pray with your kids, I would say you could go there, there. And I should say too that the book is also on audible and I had such a blast recording it.

I actually had to re record the last chapter three times because I just kept crying. And the lady in the studio, the lady goes, I'm so sorry, but you can still, you can still hear that you're crying. Can you do it again? One of these?

We're going to keep it together.

So, hey, what's wrong with crying? What's wrong with crying?

I know. So if you're an audible person, it's there for you.

That's awesome. Thank you so much for being on the Collide Podcast, Erica.

Oh, thanks so much for having me. This has been really great. I hope your listeners were super blessed.

I'm positive they were. Friend. I hope you enjoyed that episode with Erica. Make sure to check out her resources.

I know that if I had little ones at home, I definitely would myself, but I don't know where you're at. I don't know if inviting your kids into faith and prayer has felt intimidating. I don't know if you carry some baggage from your past.

I don't know if you have some wounds because your parents or your childhood church did it in a way that felt gross. But my encouragement to you is to see it as an invitation. Invite your kids to know the love of Jesus, the goodness of Jesus.

Give them a relationship with the one who never changes. Who will be here when maybe someday you won't.

Invite your kids to know that they can come to him as they are, not as the one world tells them they have to be, not as other people's expectations tell them they have to be, not as perfectionism tells them that they have to be, but that they can come unadorned, fully authentic, before Jesus. And he loves them. Right there. It's one of the greatest invitations we can give our kids. So, friend, keep colliding and collide with your kids.

We'll catch a nice next week.