Heavenly Father Answers Prayers FHE

Introduction: Hold up the picture from the friend with hearts hidden within it. Have your family find the hearts within the picture. talk about how we can feel Heavenly Father’s love as we pray. He sends His love in different ways, but he always answers our prayers with love. Explain that there are hearts around the room with ways Heavenly Father answers our prayers and one at a time, pick a family member to find a heart. Make sure to keep it as even as possible among siblings. As each heart is found, read the phrase and then the story that goes with it.

1. He grants your prayer. Read the story about Charlotte and the shoes (based on your family’s attention span, you can pick the long version or the short version). Talk about other ways Heavenly Father has answered with “yes,” in your family. Consider each time you bless the food or pray for safety or a good night’s rest. Most of the time, Heavenly Father answers those with yes and we often don’t even think about it!
2. He tells you no. Read the story about Ben from the Friend. you can shorten it to one example if you’d like but it is a simple enough story that young children should understand while older children can pick up on how prayer to Heavenly Father works.
3. He gives you something better. Tell your family about the Israelites in the wilderness, as found in Exodus 16. Tell them the Israelites had just left Egypt and we’re so excited to be free. They were excited that Heavenly Father was helping them. But it still wasn’t easy. They were hungry and they missed all the food in Egypt. They had Moses ask Heavenly Father to send them food. He sent them Manna! He answered their prayers but it was not with food that they knew about. It was a new food. And it had a lot of rules that they didn’t want to follow. Why did Heavenly Father send them Manna instead of the food they were used to? They had to learn to trust Heavenly Father and follow His rules.
4. He makes you wait. Read Samuel 1:1-20. Tell the story of Hannah. Hannah was really sad! She had waited a long time for something that was good and something that Heavenly Father had promised*. But she didn’t get the thing she wanted right away. Eventually, she prayed and told Heavenly Father that if he would give her the thing she wanted, she would make sure he grew into a good person that would serve Him in the temple. Talk about how sometimes Heavenly Father needs us to learn or grow before he can give us what we want. What are some other reasons He might ask us to wait? (you could talk about Abish and being told to wait because the people weren’t ready to hear what she knew, yet).
5. He gives comfort/peace. Hold up the picture of David O. McKay. Tell your family he was the prophet from 1951 to 1970. This is a story about when he was a little boy. Read “David’s Prayer,” From the August 2004 Friend (here’s a shorter version with pictures) about President David O. McKay.  Discuss how sometimes answers to prayer are just a feeling of comfort. Tell your family that any time we are afraid, we can pray to Heavenly Father and he will help us and bring us comfort. Sometimes the comfort will feel like a warm fuzzy blanket, and sometimes He’ll just take away our worry. Sometimes we will just know that Heavenly Father loves us and that we will be okay.
6. He sends others. Hold up the figures of Alma and Amulek. Tell your family that Alma the prophet went to visit the city of Ammonihah and they were so wicked that they did not want to listen. Alma left and was sad. An angel told him to go back, and Alma listened. Read Alma 8: 14-27. Heavenly Father used Amulek to give Alma some help. The people listened to Amulek because they trusted him. He was able to teach the people. Amulek knew that Alma would need help because an angel told him. An angel might not tell us to help people, but when we listen to the Holy Ghost and try to do nice things for others, we can help answer someone else’s prayer.
7. He tells us in our mind (we just “know”). Hold up the picture of Oliver Cowdery and Joseph working on translating the Book of Mormon. Tell your family that Oliver wanted to know with absolute certainty that the church was true. He kept struggling with doubt. He prayed to know for sure, got his answer, but still questioned it. Heavenly Father told Joseph to tell him to trust his answer. Read Doctrine and Covenants 8, especially focusing on verses 1-3. Talk about how he knew his answer because Heavenly Father had told him! He didn’t need the prophet to tell him, because Heavenly Father can talk right to us. For younger kids, stop there. Older kids may benefit from also reading Doctrine and Covenants 9 (especially verses 8-9) and talking about the rest of the story.
8. We find the answer after study. Sometimes Heavenly Father wants us to do a little work before we get the answer (If you didn’t read Doctrine and Covenants 9:8-9, you could read it now). Sometimes we can get that answer by reading the scriptures or listening to what the prophets have said. Sometimes that study is just taking the best choice and seeing what happens. Heavenly Father will help you know if it is right or wrong. And sometimes he just lets us choose because there isn’t a bad answer! He loves us enough to let us make our own choices. Read the story about the brother of Jared in Ether 2-3. If Heavenly Father hadn’t let the brother of Jared make his own choices, he would not have had enough faith to see Jesus! Each time we make a choice and trust Heavenly Father to help us know if it is right or wrong, our faith grows.