http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHABWLC3dQA

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Here in Atlanta we’re in the middle of a terrible drought.  We’re under an absolute outdoor watering ban and our main source of water – Lake Lanier – is quickly disappearing.  Some estimates say we have less than a month or two supply of water before we’re out.  I haven’t seen a drop of rain in a month.

On Tuesday our Governor, Sonny Perdue, called a prayer meeting to pray for rain at the State Capitol here in Atlanta.  About 250 people came.  The press, who are paid to be skeptics, were also there in force.  In Wednesday’s edition of the Atlanta Journal-Consitition they printed a picture of the governor with his eyes closed in prayer sitting in the brilliant sunshine.  The caption under the picture said, “Gov. Sonny Purdue was not discouraged by the clear skies Tuesday.  He said, God ‘can make it rain next week or next month,’ he told reporters.”  

Since the governor announced the prayer meeting, the paper has been giving equal time to those who think that governors shouldn’t pray, much less ask others to join him in prayer.  One editorial written by a minister said that we really shouldn’t pray for rain because it was determined by natural forces, not God.  Rather a better thing to pray for the wisdom to conserve water and handle the drought.

Protestors from the Atlanta Freethought Society were on hand a block away from the Capitol holding signs that said, “Check the weather report before praying for rain” and “Pray on the Church steps not the Capitol steps.”

On Wednesday night at around 11:00, Gordon and I were awakened by a sudden, loud sound.  It was rain hammering on the roof, something akin to a sudden, hard thunderstorm shower.  It didn’t last terribly long.  But it did rain with such unmistakabe power that it woke us out of a sound sleep.  When I went out on my morning prayer walk the grass had turned green and I could hear the little creek in the woods babbling again. 

This morning’s paper carried a little sidebar that said, “Blessed Rainfalls.”  It said, “Just like Perude – and the National Weather Service – predicted, it was a rainy night in Georgia on Wednesday.”

The sidebar went on  to quote a meteorologist, “It will tease us a little bit.  The ground is so dry it will absorb everythig that falls on it.”

It’s fascinating to me that we go to such great lengths to put qualifiers all over prayer and answers to prayer.  It’s like our society ties a rope around prayer, saying, “Don’t pray.”  And then when prayers are answered society says, “Prayer and the answer that came really didn’t make a difference.”    

In the Bible, people often prayed for rain.  It was celebrated as one of God’s most precious blessings.  James 5:17,18 says, “Elijah was a man just like us.  He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years.  Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced crops.” 

Actually, there was some humility involved when the Governor prayed for rain.  Not only was he setting himself up for the skeptical press reports that followed, but he was also admitting our part in the problem.  He said, “Georgians have not done all we could do in conservation…Hopefully we will be better conservators of the blessings God’s given us as he give us more rain.”   

Of course there’s no way to convince someone who doesn’t believe in prayer that God hears us.  The only thing I can say to the skeptics is that it rained hard last night.     

On Monday, October 29, 2007 at noon our son Captain Chris Barber returned home from Iraq.  Our whole family drove to North Carolina to be on base when his plane landed.  We hadn’t seen Chris for 15 months.  

There were cheers, banners, hugs, tears and plenty of smiles.  But most of all there was a deep down feeling of peace and thankfulness.  When we arrived at Chris’s home, before he even changed out of the uniform that he’d spent the night in on the plane, we stood out on his small back deck and Chris stood there facing the small creek area behind his house drinking in the sight of ordinary trees in the sunshine.  

How simple a sight and how simple a pleasure and yet it helped me see with new eyes the sorts of gifts we take for granted and hardly see.  It reminded me of the hundreds and thousands of you who have prayed for my son, either by name or in your daily prayers where you mention our soldiers in harms way.  

Your prayers have been answered.  And we’re all extremely grateful.   Thank you from the bottom or our hearts.       

My husband Gordon and I were eating at a cafeteria style Chinese restaurant.  I opened my fortune cookie and here’s what it said, “Faith is personal, but never private.” It sounded much more profound than I could figure out there over the fried rice, so I stuck it in my purse and brought the tiny slip of paper home. 

I got to wondering if personal and private have two different meanings.  I looked them up in the dictionary and private has more of a meaning of secrecy or not for public view or use.  Personal means pertaining to a particular person, such as their individual qualities or possessions. 

I named my video series Personal Prayer Power in the sense of being the time an individual spends developing their own unique relationship with God.  Each individual nurtures or neglects this for themselves.  It’s done in private, when no one else is around so in a sense it’s both personal and private prayer.  

And yet I can’t say that it’s effects are completely personal or private.  In our alone time we often pray for other people, even whole nations.  Jesus says, “No one lights a lamp and hides it in a jar or puts it under a bed.  Instead, he puts it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light.  For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.”  (Luke 8:16,17)  

So personal faith and personal prayer really aren’t private after all, just like this fortune says.  They affect our relationships with the others in our world. 

In a previous post I mentioned that in 1980 I was chosen to attend the Guideposts Writer’s Workshop in Rye, NY where I was priviledged to meet Catherine Marshall. 

When I learned that Catherine (that’s what the editors fondly called her) would be at the workshop, I was absolutely star struck because I consider her the pioneer of Christian inspirational writing of our era.  I was 6 months pregnant at the time of the workshop.  (I was pregnant with our son, Chris, who inspired my website www.militaryprayers.org)  I was dying for Catherine’s autograph, so I found room in my suitcase for a cheap (and light!) paperback copy of Beyond Our Selves hoping to get her autograph.  

I didn’t know much about books back then and I’d never really understood that paperbacks are made out of pulp paper and aren’t made to last like hardbacks.  In fact, the book was already several years old when I carried it to New York.  Nevertheless, Catherine gamely signed it “To Karen Barber.  Cordially, Catherine Marshall.”  I still treasure the book, even though the pages are turning brown with age.

As the 15 writers and assorted editors sat in a circle of chairs around a large room, Catherine told us about her passion for writing.  She described for us how writers like herself are fairly solitary people who prefer being alone with their thoughts.  She also described her particular thirst for details, which her editor husband, Leonard LeSourd, agreed might go a little overboard at times.  She described how while writing her best selling novel Christy she persuaded the railroad to allow her to ride a segment of rails that her grandmother would have ridden to arrive in the small town in West Viriginia where she would teach in the one room school house at Cutter’s Gap. 

So zealous was Catherine for detailed research that she admitted that on her current project – her novel Julie later published in 1984 -that she traveled to England to learn more about the family background of a ficticious English character whose family name she had randomly chosen.   

Along with all of the insight into writing, Catherine surprised me by mentioning a heartfelt regret about her work – that Christy had never been made into a movie.  The movie rights had been purchased by a major stuido – and then tabled.   Only years later was Christy finally filmed in a special TV series. 

This disappointment suprised me because I’d always assumed that famous and incredibly gifted authors such as Catherine would have all of the necessary doors easily opened to them.  However, being one of us was her particular form of genius.  I realized that her writings struck such deep chords in all of us because she was indeed one of us.   She had a knack of saying, “I don’t think I’m a special case.”  By that she meant that the way God was real in her life was the way God could be real in anyone’s life.  Even in mine.    

On my last blog I talked about Elizabeth Sherrill’s incredible new book All the Way to Heaven.  One subject that she deals with in the book is her lifelong dealings with depression. 

One day a friend had emailed me how worried she was about a son going through a relationship break up.  She particularly hoped he wouldn’t get depressed because it was something that he’d dealt with already in his life.  I emailed her this link to Elizabeth’s web page: http://www.elizabethsherrill.com/sherrill_behind_scenes2.html

On this page Elizabeth tells how to deal with depression when it comes back and how to continue living a productive, meaningful life.      

I first met Elizabeth Sherrill in 1980 when I was chosen to attend the Guideposts Writers Workshop in Rye, New York.  Elizabeth and her husband, John are incredible speakers and teachers who taught us how to write a Guideposts story and also how to think like a reader and how to ask the questions readers would ask if they had a chance to meet the person whose story we were ghost-writing. 

Elizabeth and John co-authored The Hiding Place with Corrie Ten Boom and also the Cross and the Switchblade.  Her thirty or so books have sales in excess of 50 million.  To find out more about Elizabeth go to www.elizabethsherrill.com 

Her latest book All the Way to Heaven is very unique because for the first time, Elizabeth chronicles her own life and faith journey instead of writing someone else’s.  You’ll be surprised to find that this prolific Christian writer was brought up as an agnostic and was in her thirties before she took  the leap of faith to join the church and declare her belief in Christ.  You’ll also be surprised to learn that she suffers from depression, sometimes for long periods.  And you’ll be intrigued by the journies she and John have taken through the world and through the decades of our recent history, meeting and inteviewing some of the most fascinating figures of our times including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

But most of all, this book is about heaven.  Elizabeth divides it into three parts.  In “Heaven behind me” she tells about her days before she found faith and she sees how God was present guiding her even then.  In “Heaven around me” she tells of how she finally found faith and how during any minute of any ordinary day we can follow her lead and find a small glimmer of heaven in the moment we’re currently living. 

In “Heaven before me” Elizabeth takes us on a journey to expand our ideas about the heaven we will enter when we leave this earth.    She sets aside cliches and embarks on a remarkably thoughtful, deeply thought out and keenly felt investigation about heaven.  

Her bottom line, however, isn’t about heaven as a far away place when we die, but rather heaven being right here on earth as we’re living in God’s Kingdom.    

Elizabeth certainly has expanded the way I think about heaven.  My prayer is that through prayer you’ll get in touch with the part of heaven that’s yours today wherever you are. 

This morning I bought a stack of old sheet music at a garage sale.  I’m always on the look-out for music since my sister Susan, who plays the piano, lost all of her music in their house fire several years ago.

When I got home and went through the stack I found this lovely piece “I said my pajamas and put on my prayers.”  Apparently it was recorded by Victor Records in the 1950’s by Tony Martin and Fran Warren.  The lyrics go:

“My babby kissed me goodnight, and I am glad to relate, That by the time I got home, I was feeling great!  I climbed up the door and opened the stairs; I said my pajamas and put on my prayers; I turned off the bed, and crawled into the light and all because you kissed me good night.”

As I smiled at the whimsical lyrics, I got to thinking about the theology of “putting on my prayers.”  Here’s a good question I might ask myself after praying.  “I’ve said my prayers, but have I put them on?”  By that I mean have I taken ownership for what I’ve just prayed, not just leaving them as wishful words but as a beginning of a journey that will take me to the answer God has in mind.   I could even find myself ”crawling into the light” as I slowly move toward an understanding of where God is leading me.  

I’ve never heard this song before and I can’t carry a tune, but I really like this song.  It mixes up our perceptions of everyday life, showing how love can make our ordinary life a new realm filled with surprising discovery.