What got me going tonight

The power of prayer is the wind in my sails right now. I’m sort of floating on a cloud because of it. Sounds like a churchy high to me! Yikes. Not good.  It started about six months ago when a Mom’s in Prayer group started up at our school. Pure awesomeness is what that is. Please go check out MIP if you’re not familiar with it. Even if you are familiar with it and you think you’re too busy to join a group…..please consider it. If your child is in public school, Christian school, homeschooled, straight A’s or straight F’s please go check out MIP. Chances are, there’s a group in your area. It is one of the greatest gifts you could ever give your child. In a nutshell: you pray for one hour once a week with other Mom’s/Grandmother’s for your children and their teachers/school they attend. A four step prayer guide is used to help keep the time on track. You don’t share your requests, you pray them. Short and simple prayers like that of a child. 

Our MIP group has taken on these really long prayers. That’s partly my fault since I’m leading it. I’m not sure why but often times I get lost in my prayers as if I’m at Panera Bread having lunch with Jesus. I forget that there are others praying and that they would like to have a turn to talk to Him as well. So this longwinded prayin’ chick is having to learn to shorten her dialogue. Our group is still learning how best to utilize our time and in His grace God is hearing us and answering us. It’s been so awesome to see Him work through this time. We are excited and some of our teachers are really excited as well. But I what I really wanted to write about is what happened tonight at church:

We don’t usually have many kids on Sunday nights and our kids sit with me and Sophie colors and Mitchell has to write out five things he learned from the teaching and then he can draw or whatever. But tonight some girls from my Sunday School class showed up and so I ended up taking all the kids to another room and watching them. At first we played charades and goofed around and  then I felt very compelled to try out our MIP prayer guide with them. I grabbed a dry erase board and had a student write out the word PRAISE at the top of the board. We talked about and listed a few attributes of God: Love, Faithful, Omnipresent, Invisible. And then we stopped and we all praised Him for those things. I told the students that they didn’t have to pray and that we wouldn’t go in a circle but that I’d love it if they would just tell God what we just talked about as a group. I felt like we’d be doing good if maybe 3 or 4 kids prayed aloud. But every child prayed. I told them short popcorn prayers is what we were looking for and that we wouldn’t ask God for anything during this time. Just praising Him for who He is. We prayed about 4 rounds of praises. Elementary voices praising God in simple short phrases.  I couldn’t believe it. One little voice piped up in the middle of the rapid fire popcorn praise and said, “Jesus, I really like you.”   That brought tears to my eyes. Then we stopped the praise time and pulled out the dry erase board again and another student wrote the word CONFESSION at the top and we read I Jn. 1:9 aloud and talked about different sins we commit during the week: lie, gossip, bad attitude, disobey, etc. And then we had a silent time of confession. After that we wrote THANKSGIVING at the top of that dry erase board and listed things we were all thankful for. I asked if anyone wanted to lead our time in prayer. Every hand went up. This surprised me and excited me. Kids began thanking God for family, shelter, flowers, trees to give us shade and much more. Finally we moved into our time of INTERCESSION and yes, I had them spell that huge word at the top of the board and then told them what it meant. And instead of listing and taking a bunch of prayer requests we did one at a time for the purpose of praying in one accord. The first person shared about the death of her Uncle. We talked about how we could all pray about that in different ways and lift that prayer to the Lord. Young voices and one tiny voice lifted this family in prayer in the most precious way. I couldn’t believe I was getting to experience this. Beautiful and refreshing is what it was. Another person shared a request about traveling to a tournament. So we wrote that down and then prayed different things around that one request. Prayed for no injuries, safety on road, that they would win, play good with no stinky attitudes, etc. Each person shared a request and then the whole group came along side that request and prayed. These young children of faith were joining together as a Body of Christ and lifting each other up in prayer, in one accord.  And I know heaven was listening.

It’s moments like these that make my faith stronger and I’m reminded that these kids that I’m supposedly leading are actually leading me.