Spirit #5 – When the Spirit Speaks to Children of Faith

Workings of the Holy Spirit 

One day I received a phone call from the leader of our intercessory prayer group. A teenager was missing. The details were vague. Could our family pray?

My young children were with me at the time—ages 5, 10, and 11. They recently received the gift of the Holy Spirit*, so we had yet to discover how the Spirit would manifest to them (1 Cor.12:11 NIV). I asked if they wanted to pray with me for a high school boy that nobody could find.

Eyes closed. Hearts focused. We prayed. After less than five minutes, the youngest shared.

1. She had seen a heart traveling upwards, but the heart couldn’t get past a big wooden block.
2. The oldest had seen a guardrail.
3. The third only had a feeling that his prayer was being blocked.

As I quickly wrote notes for a return call to the church-leader, my phone rang again. They found the boy. He was dead.

Now I understood. The blocked heart, the guardrail, and blocked feeling all meant that our prayers could not save the boy now. Instead, the leader and I prayed for his family.

I withheld the unhappy outcome from my children that day. Instead, I hugged and kissed them and remarked that they had truly heard God.

The Spirit sweetly communicates with children of faith right where they’re at: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child” (1 Cor. 13:11 NKJV).
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*Acts 2:2-4 NIV

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.