Prayer List
The list from my church grows longer and longer. That’s where I see names of those to be prayed for in this tangled world with its troubles.
The list cannot capture all the struggles, but it’s a beginning: cancer victims, the grief-stricken, lost ones, the poor, the caregivers, the military, those ailing from body aches and diseases, accidents, family issues, anxious mothers, jobless fathers, unity for the country, those in nursing homes, alcoholics and drug addicts, relationship issues, the lonely, governmental decisions, children, churches, community, ourselves. On and on it goes….
No one questions the trueness, the realness on the list.
In addition, there’s the unspoken. Whenever someone writes his or her own name and puts “unspoken” beside it, we know it’s personal and of major importance.
There’s usually great suffering in those requests for prayer. Never generic. So close to the heart, they cannot tell it…not yet.
Not sure how others do it, but I turn the list of people over to a mighty God, one person at a time, one concern at a time. It’s a little like a mother tucking her children in at night. But God is far bigger and can actually cure and forgive faster than I can hit a number on the microwave keypad.
Happily, God is always available, ready to hear us surrender to Him, ready for us to hand over all our troubles, worries, and prayer lists, no matter how short or long.
I just need to humble myself before Him, believe and ask like a little kid, then let it go.
If God has our hearts, He knows us and will answer our prayers with yes, no, or wait. Everything, according to His higher, better way. And isn’t that what we want, the better plan?
It’s like He is saying, I make the flowers grow. I’ve been waiting for you to give these people and concerns to me. Now believe. I’ve got this.
A scripture from the Bible backs this up: Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. (Mark 11:24, KJV)
Done. What a comfort.
God chooses Jesus’s love over Aristotle’s logic every time, every day. It pleases God when we pass His love and kindness on to others.
Seeing the world from far away like the media reports, it looks like there’s only war, poverty, sadness, badness. And it’s true, those things exist in so many places.
But that’s not all of the story.
Up close with individuals, if we look for it, we see kindness and love. It is from the clerk at the grocery store, the man in the elevator, the mail carrier, the children playing in the ditch, a neighbor. It’s everywhere, in all countries, under all circumstances.
Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsie were imprisoned in a concentration camp in Germany in the 1940s. (The ten Boom family were guilty of hiding Jews in their home from the Nazis.) Corrie and Betsie were housed in a lice-infested barracks where they taught the love of God to the women who were confined there with them. Prayer was how they talked and listened to God.
Before Betsie died in the camp from an illness, she told Corrie, There is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still.
Corrie was released 15 days after Betsie’s death—her release was a clerical error. Or was it God at work? (More of their story can be read in The Hiding Place (1971) by Corrie ten Boom, John Sherrill, and Elizabeth Sherrill.)
Corrie’s love story has touched many hearts.
Dear reader, I ask God to flip the light on and give you and me the eyes to see love in the world, to pray for others, and to tell our stories.
God bless,
Pat Durmon
patdurmon.com
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Daffodil greens at the Durmon home. Photo taken by Jimmy Durmon, February 17, 2019.