Time Away

This morning we set aside the entire morning to pray, along with all the other branches and entities in our organization around the world. I actually do feel like I had a few hours away - even though I was the one facilitating and organizing everything today!

Our organization had provided a bit of a powerpoint show, along with a couple of movies clips to aid in our prayer time, so it didn't take that many hours of work to prepare for the day, which was good, since I've got several other projects on the go at the moment! One of our translators here is also a very good choir master and he helped us out by choosing and leading a few songs for us today.

I think the day actually went exceedingly well! My hope was that we wouldn't spend most of the time talking about our prayer requests, but that we would actually spend most of the time praying together. My hope was also that we wouldn't spend the whole time praying for our own needs here in this country, but that we would pray for the people and projects that we don't normally think about, in other parts of the world.

And I think we achieved that, actually. No one fell asleep we were praying, everyone participated, everyone had opportunity to pray in which ever language they felt most comfortable praying in... and then we all enjoyed good fellowship over lunch, which the girls in the kitchen prepared so well for us!

It was truly a refreshing time, and I felt so privileged to be together in a room full of people from so many different cultures, who have so many stories to tell, who have such mature faiths, and to be united with them as we prayed for people all around the world.

I used this old globe that we dug out of one of the storage containers and was able to show the different parts of the world that we were praying for. And I also gave everyone a good laugh when I couldn't find Argentina. At least I knew which continent it was on...

And I still do marvel at how God has given me the ability to stand up in front of a room full of people and lead them in a half day of prayer, without even being nervous about it!

So I encourage you to spend a few minutes today to pray for a country or a project or some people that you might know in some far off corner of the world that you don't normally think about. Maybe you read something in the newspaper about something that's happening in a country you've never heard of, or you read an article online about someone in a far corner of the globe. Don't just walk away and think, "Hmmm, that's interesting". Let's spend a minute and pray for the people of that place. In fact, I'm going to go and read some BBC news right now and see who needs some prayer today...