Prayer Works

I’ve been keeping track of prayer since 1988.

That’s when I first started journaling my prayers. I write down who I’m praying for, what I’m praying about and then later I write how the prayer was answered. I began doing this when I joined the prayer chain at church and then as part of my small group. If I go back to my first journal, I actually may have started earlier than 1988, but I know that’s when I first joined my small group. My small group consists of four women, (including myself) who meet weekly to study God’s word and share each other’s joys and burdens. I can’t imagine not having this kind of support in my life. I journal all prayer from what is shared in my group, in my Sunday School, in youth group, and whenever I am moved to pray about something in particular. The enormous blessing of writing everything down is to go back and see how God works in answering prayer, and not always in the way we think He’s going to.

Yesterday I had an opportunity to speak in front of our church about the retreat we recently had to decide our direction. We read the book, “Unbinding the Gospel” prior to the retreat. This book is about a 4-year study funded by the Lily Foundation to find out what makes some mainline protestant churches grow. It seems prayer has a lot to do with it. Well, duh. There is a lot of other great stuff in the book, but this is step one.

So, our church has decided to become a church of intentional prayer. There are lots of ways we are going to do that, but let’s just say that prayer is going to permeate throughout our church 24/7. This is a good. And if you doubt this is going to make any difference, come on over and I’ll show you my prayer journals.

God is good.
All the time.
And, He answers prayer.
All the time.

As always, thank you so much for including me and my family in your prayers. I am still here because of them.