Archive for September, 2007

I Said My Pajamas and Put on My Prayers

Friday, September 28th, 2007

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. 

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Will You Join Me In Praying for a Prayer Renewal?

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

Recently I was going through my journals and came across a prayer I had written about my dreams and desires that personal prayer would be revolutionized in our world today.  Tonight I’m going to meet with a group of women at my church who are called the Flame Bearers Prayer Group.  I’ve printed out the following prayer on stationary with angels on it and I’m going to ask them to join me in praying for a prayer movement to sweep our country.  If you’d like to join us, use the following prayer in any way that God leads: 

Would you join with me in praying that the

personal prayer lives of those near and far be

energized by God’s Holy Spirit?

 

I pray that your Spirit would go and seek out the in-

dividual lives where prayer is lifeless, colorless and

tired and nothing but duty and ritual.   

 

To find those whose prayers are held back by fear and

hopelessness, whose vision is clouded with doubt and

sorrow. 

 

To reach those who are already faithful in their prayers

that they might reach new levels of Grace and

spiritual growth through prayer.

 

To reach those who know very little about prayer, who have

never known it’s possible to pray to a God who hears and cares

and can change their lives forever.

 

To seek those going through crisis periods when they find it

hard to pray, and those who are having trouble praying because

they’re depressed and those who are so busy and focused on this

world that they forget to pray.

 

I pray that Your Spirit will uncover all spiritually thirsty ground

so that personal prayer will be revolutionized in our world today

according to God’s plan.

 

Let it be so.  Amen.

 

 

 

 

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Faith Connections through the Internet

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

Tonight I opened the folder in which I’ve printed out emails from people about my www.militaryprayers.org website.  I paused over one from a delightful woman named Onita in Roswell, New Mexico.  She told me that she’s in a women’s circle that sews cool collars for our soldiers in the desert and they’d just purchased ten yards of material and wanted to make one for each of the members of my son’s platoon.

I emailed her back and told her that thankfully Chris is scheduled to come home by the end of October and we’d been told that the deadline for the last packages was September.  However I asked Onita if I might find out if another military mom who had emailed me from Kentucky might see if her son could use them.  The mother in Kentucky was thrilled as someone had given her son one of the collars and he loved it.

This illustrates how the internet is being used by God’s good people to connect us in ways that wasn’t possible a few years ago.  God connected three women, one in Georgia, one in New Mexico and one in Kentucky to send something halfway around the world to Iraq.  He paired a giver with someone who was a grateful receiver even though they were hundreds of miles apart. 

I read several weeks ago that people of faith are the most frequent users of the internet and that religious sites outnumber all others.  Guideposts Magazine has started a site called www.ourprayer.org   The purpose is to form online faith communities and connections so that all of us will be strengthened and helped by each other.   I’ll be seeing you there!        

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The World of Prayer and the ISBN Country Called Bookland

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

When I was getting my Personal Prayer Power materials published I had to buy special ISBN numbers for all of my products and I learned about the existence of an imaginary country called Bookland. 

The ISBN website explained that normally electronic price codes are set up according to the country where the product is produced, however with books it’s a different story.  Apparently so many books are published all over the world that they needed their own price code.  They call this imaginary country ”Bookland.”   This is a country with no physical geography that you can travel.  You have to travel this vast country with your mind and imagination.  It’s not made up of real estate.  It’s made up of what we call ”intellectual properties” where people own copyrights, not land.    

Jesus spent nearly His entire earthly ministry talking about something He called the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven.  John ends his gospel by saying, “Jesus did many other things as well.  If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world could not have room for the books that would be written.”  (John 21:25)

Although we can’t see the Kingdom of God, it is a vast spiritual territory that covers the entire universe.  It is perceived with minds and hearts and yet goes beyond anything that billions of people working together might be able to perceive if each person knew just one small part.

When we pray, we enter God’s Kingdom.  It is a very real place that defies geography and time.  It is truly the greatest frontier, one that anyone can explore.  Talk to God today and enter His Kingdom.          

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What Really Counts in Prayer: Theories or Experience?

Saturday, September 15th, 2007

A friend recently emailed me that her husband was attending a seminar on entreprenuership at a university.  Her husband is a small business owner with a successful chain of family owned hardware stores.  My friend wrote:

My husband says that everyone there has high foreheads and big heads, indicating a lot of brains.  There are resumes of all the attendees and my husband’s is the shortest one.  Most are Deans and have published extensively.  Still, he can learn if he gets past the intimidation factor.

I wrote my friend back that her husband probably has more practical experience of how things work in the real world than all of the professors who have done case studies and made up theories and published them.  My friend’s husband is really the expert in my eyes, because he’s actually done what the professors have studied so extensively.

This has great bearing on prayer.  Maybe you’re like me and you’d rather be a prayer entreprenuer than someone who studies theories about prayer.  When I decided to get serious about interactive prayer, I started from scratch and set aside all of the theories expounded by  those who sit around talking about prayer in its ideal form and not about how it actually works in complex, hectic modern life. 

My vision is to help people actually try praying in different ways.  I think it’s a healthy part of the process to try things even if they don’t work out.  I personally have made a few honest mistakes that helped me find out what really works in real life and what doesn’t.

I believe that there are many different ways of praying during private prayer that are unique to our personalities.  Only the individual can discover how they best hear from and communicate with God.  At least that’s my theory.  So try it out!    

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A Healing Answer While Taping a TV Show

Friday, September 14th, 2007

This week I traveled to Greenville, SC to be a guest on the Peggy Denny Show on WGGS TV 16.  (The show will air in the Greenville area on Oct. 3 at 1 PM)

Peggy is a delightful person and it was a pleasure to talk with her on camera about prayer.   When we were talking about the three main categories of prayer answers and I was describing presence answers Peggy said, “I know what you’re talking about.” 

She had earlier explained to me that three years ago her health had been chronically bad and she couldn’t seem to get better.  One day she became so ill that her husband called Duke University Hospital and got her an appointment with one of the head specialists.  It turned out that Peggy actually had been suffering from cancer in one of her kidneys.  Luckily it hadn’t spread.  

Peggy said, “As they were wheeling me into surgery I felt God was there with me.  It was an incredibly peaceful feeling.”

I told Peggy, “Yes, that was a presence answer to prayer and it was real.”  I went on to say how we don’t often hear presence answers shared in group meetings or being passed along prayer chains as answers to prayer because they’re so wonderfully personal.  Presence answers touch our emotions in ways you simply have to feel to understand.  Other people can’t transfer their feelings of God’s nearness to us.  Therefore, presence answers to prayer are as unique as we are and the most treasured of all because they are the individualized touch of God on our hearts and souls that transcend all understanding. 

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A Healing for My Worried Friend

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

In a previous blog I wrote about a friend who was having a biopsy who was terribly worried.  She lives alone.  She’s  divorced, has no children, both of her parents are dead. 

This morning as I was brushing my hair my friend called me and told me that she had been completely and miraculously healed.   

She told me that she’d gone to a healing service and had gone forward with a group of about 300 people who wanted prayer.  When the minister put his hands on her, my friend said she had a warm feeling all over her.  She says, “His hand felt really heavy.  I felt like there was nothing else around me and if someone hadn’t caught me from behind, I would have fallen to the floor.”

 She went on to tell me that she went to the doctors and was told that the biopsy was negative and that all they found was a site where it seemed some sort of small injury had healed up.

After we’d finished thanking God for this miracle I told my friend, “I really don’t understand healing, why sometimes we’re miraculously healed and sometimes we’re not.  I only know that you can use it as a way to know that God love you.”

My friend replied, “Yes, I’ve never felt so loved in all of my life.”     

It brought to mind something that happened to my mother a number of years ago that I share in the Personal Prayer Power video lesson on prayer and healing.  Altlhough Mom was a person of great faith, she battled depression and wished she could feel God’s love. 

Then one day she underwent a lumpectomy for breast cancer.  All of her friends and family were so wonderfully kind and supportive during that time that Mom later told me, “I’ve never felt so loved in all of my life.” 

It seems strange that both my friend and my mother would face similar diseases and have such radically different healing paths, yet both come to the same conclusion, “I’ve never felt so loved in all of my life.”

I suppose what I’m learning is that love is always the best cure, whether we’re mirculously healed or whether we go through difficult medical treatment with the supporting presence of God and His good people.     

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When You Say God Answers Every Prayer, Does That Mean He’ll Answer All of Our Questions?

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

 

            In the Personal Prayer Power series I state that I believe that we can find an answer to every prayer.  I base this on my experiences that God responds in some way every time we pray.  Of course God doesn’t always fix our situations.  Many times God helps us through them or guides us with new ideas.  These strength and guidance provisions are both valid responses to our prayers, too.

            Even though I believe God responds in some way to every prayer, that doesn’t mean that I think that God will fully answer all of our questions.  One time when I was in a crisis situation I prayed, “God, please tell me how this is going to end.”  An answer came, though not the one I expected.  The answer?  “Trust me.” (see John 14:1)  

            Does God answer all of our prayers?  Yes.  Does He answer all of our questions in the way we want?  No.   

            I picture our questions of God as the sorts of questions our children ask us when they’re preschoolers.  I can picture sitting at the dinner table buttering bread and the child  asks, “Why are you doing that?’  We reply, “To make it taste better.”  And then the child says right back, “But why does it make it taste better?”  

How do we answer a question like that?  If we looked it up online we’d be able to explain the complicated physiological reason involving taste buds and food chemistry.  But fully answering the question would require the child to understand the sorts of things they’ll later learn in high biology and chemistry.  So at the dinner table we say to the child the reason that butter tastes good on bread is, “Because it just does.”

            I will venture to say that all of us have a few good questions we’d like to ask God when we get to heaven.  Don’t let those questions stand in our way of finding the answers to prayer that God’s sending our way every day.  He cares.  And He responds, even when we don’t have all of the answers to our question “why.”   

    

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Does Prayer Make Us Worry Free?

Sunday, September 2nd, 2007

Recently a friend in

West Virginia asked me to pray for her because a mammogram had turned up something suspicious.  They scheduled her for a biopsy – but it was several weeks away.  I prayed for my friend’s healing over the phone and she told me that she was especially concerned because her mother had died of cancer.   

            I called my friend back several days later and she didn’t answer so I left a message to let her know I was praying.  Several more days went by and I called her again.  This time she answered the phone and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t call you back, but I’ve been so down lately.  Is it wrong to be worried even when you’re praying?”

            I told her, “I think worrying is normal.  I’ve had times myself when I had to go back for further tests on lumps and I was worried to death.”

            She seemed extremely relieved that what she was feeling was normal.  After we hung up I got to thinking about prayer and worry.  There are probably theologians who have better answers than I do, but I like to look at things from the practical side.  From my own experience I believe that it’s natural to worry and even those of strongest faith worry when faced with a crisis.  That’s because God put us together with the ability to evaluate situations to see whether or not they’re serious so we can plan, so we can protect ourselves and so we can pray.  Being worried about something is a very good motivator to start praying! 

            The kind of interactive prayer I talk about in the Personal Prayer Power series is the kind where we honestly admit our worries to God without trying to “get better” on our own.  Worries can’t be cured by planning and getting facts because worry is an attitude that’s part rational and part irrational because worry is often based on “what if” scenarios that haven’t happened yet and fears from our past experiences.

            I don’t think prayer itself cures worry.  What eases worry is knowing that the situation is in the hands of someone who cares about us.  In Matthew Jesus tells us not to worry about the things we lack because “your heavenly Father knows that you need them.”  (Matthew 6:32)          

            Are you worried today?  Here’s a very simple thing to do.  Pray worried and leave the rest to God.  He loves you.  And He’ll be there with you no matter what happens. 

           

           

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