You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Monday, August 27th, 2018. It is also the feast day of St. Monica.

This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we are tackling the topic of prayer. The reason why we're talking about prayer this week is

because of some of the great saints that we will be celebrating, including St. Monica today.

St. Monica was the mother of St. Augustine, whose feast day is tomorrow.

Now, St. Augustine did not have the greatest youth.

St. Augustine was a known sinner and did all sorts of horrible things before he converted

to Christianity, eventually became a priest, and then a bishop, and wrote so many amazing spiritual works that we

still use today. But what happened? How did he give up this life of sin and become a great priest and

bishop? Well, he credited his conversion to the prayers of his mother, St. Monica.

St. Monica never gave up on her son. She petitioned heaven every day asking that her son's heart might be

softened and he might come to love Jesus. And in the end, after years of prayer, God heard her, and St. Augustine came into the faith.

But prayer is not something that only saints do.

We are all called to pray every single day.

When I was young, I remember not really knowing what prayer is.

It's a little hard to understand because it's something quiet that happens in the secrets of our hearts.

So I want to help you try to understand what prayer actually is.

First of all, prayer is actually very simple,

and it can be done in lots of different ways. Praying simply means being in the presence of God.

And as you know, God is everywhere. We can pray and talk to God and share our feelings with him in nature. If we see the beautiful world that God created, we can feel his presence and open

ourselves up to him. We can obviously feel the presence of God and pray to him

when we are in church. But we can do this anywhere. We could do it in our bedroom, in our living room,

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